Text-to-Speech Synthesis

A complete, end-to-end account of the process of generating speech by computer, for graduate students and practitioners.

Paul Taylor (Author)

9780521899277, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 19 February 2009

626 pages, 176 b/w illus.
25.5 x 18 x 3.4 cm, 1.39 kg

'According to Taylor, 'in written language the author may take the liberty of explaining something in a complicated fashion knowing that the reader can go back and read this several times'. However, this is not true in the case of his book. Taylor so clearly presents the concepts, that re-reading is unnecessary.' Joao Luis G. Rosa, Computing Reviews

Text-to-Speech Synthesis provides a complete, end-to-end account of the process of generating speech by computer. Giving an in-depth explanation of all aspects of current speech synthesis technology, it assumes no specialised prior knowledge. Introductory chapters on linguistics, phonetics, signal processing and speech signals lay the foundation, with subsequent material explaining how this knowledge is put to use in building practical systems that generate speech. Including coverage of the very latest techniques such as unit selection, hidden Markov model synthesis, and statistical text analysis, explanations of the more traditional techniques such as format synthesis and synthesis by rule are also provided. Weaving together the various strands of this multidisciplinary field, the book is designed for graduate students in electrical engineering, computer science, and linguistics. It is also an ideal reference for practitioners in the fields of human communication interaction and telephony.

1. Introduction
2. Communication and language
3. The text-to-speech problem
4. Text segmentation and organisation
5. Text decoding
6. Prosody prediction from text
7. Phonetics and phonology
8. Pronunciation
9. Synthesis of prosody
10. Signals and filters
11. Acoustic models of speech production
12. Analysis of speech signals
13. Synthesis techniques based on vocal tract models
14. Synthesis by concatenation and signal processing modification
15. Hidden Markov model synthesis
16. Unit selection synthesis
17. Further issues
18. Conclusions.

Subject Areas: Signal processing [UYS], Electronics & communications engineering [TJ], Electrical engineering [THR]