Text to Speech
Converting text into natural sounding speech
Speech synthesis, also known as Text-to-Speech (TTS), is the automatic generation of speech from any textual input. Philips has developed a state-of-the-art TTS engine, with a highly natural speech quality, customizable in terms of voice and emotion expression, and yet a low implementation complexity.
Text to Speech
Converting text into natural sounding speech
Speech synthesis, also known as Text-to-Speech (TTS), is the automatic generation of speech from any textual input. Philips has developed a state-of-the-art TTS engine, with a highly natural speech quality, customizable in terms of voice and emotion expression, and yet a low implementation complexity.
The increasing need for natural interfaces, together with developments in linguistics, speech- and IC-technology, makes the introduction of speech synthesis in everyday life possible.
Anticipating the trend of people interacting with complex, multi modal and personalized systems, we expect TTS to play an important role in the user interface of many applications.
Applications
- personal healthcare devices
- spoken artist and song title for mp3 players
How it works
Our algorithm has a highly natural speech quality. It uses diphone synthesis: the concatenation of prerecorded speech segments (diphones) from a database. A diphone is the transition from one basic sound (phoneme) to the next.
Traditionally, diphone synthesis suffers from artifacts. These mainly come from mismatched joints between recorded diphones and modifications to the synthesized speech for prosodic requirements. Our unique IP enables us to generate an artifact-free, very natural speech quality.
Text-to-Speech Users can define their own personalized voice from a single database, and an advanced recording tool can rapidly add new voices.
There is a set of predefined characters: man, old man, old woman, boy, young girl, robot, giant, dwarf, and alien.
There is also a set of predefined emotions: friendly, angry, furious, drill, scared, emotional, weepy, excited, surprised, sad, disgusted and whisper.
Currently, supported languages are: American English, British English, French, German, Dutch, Italian, Castilian Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, and Mandarin Chinese.
The compact TTS engine suits embedded systems:
Natural speech quality
Flexible emotion control and personalization from a single database.
Compact TTS engine, ideal for embedded systems
Language support
