Blackwell Reference Online

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This chapter will review some of the more popular approaches to speech synthesis, with an emphasis on methods useful in phonetic research. Speech synthesis is not only one of the important applications of speech and language research but, in our opinion, a very valuable tool in the study of phonetics. We will point to some present and future applications of text-to-speech technology and describe some current trends in speech synthesis research.Speech synthesis, during the last decade, has moved out of the research department and into everyday applications, such as speech-based dialog systems and aids for the disabled. Some of these applications actually employ prerecorded messages. although a professional phonetician could contribute to creating procedures for optimizing the quality of such services, we will not focus on such methods in this chapter, but concentrate on the general aspects of speech synthesis as used in, for example, text-to-speech systems.Electronic speech synthesis has developed over the last 50 years. In the publications by Fant (1960), Holmes et al. (1964), Flanagan (1972), Klatt (1976), and Allen et al. (1987), the foundations for speech synthesis based on acoustical or articulatory modeling can be found. The paper by Klatt (1987), gives an extensive review of the developments of speech synthesis techniques at that point in time. A number of textbooks and review ... log in or subscribe to read full text