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The speech synthesis group at the Computer-Based Education Research Laboratory (CERL) of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is developing a diphone speech synthesis system based on pitch-adaptive short-time Fourier transforms. This system accepts the phonemic specification of an utterance along with pitch, time, and amplitude warping functions in order to produce high quality speech output from stored diphone templates.This paper describes the operation of a program which operates as a front end for the diphone speech synthesis system. The UTTER (for "Unmarked Text Transcription by Expert Rule") system maps English text onto a phoneme string, which is then used as an input to the diphone speech synthesis system. The program is a two-tiered Expert System which operates first on the word level and then on the (vowel or consonant) cluster level. The system's knowledge about pronunciation is organized in two decision trees automatically generated by an induction algorithm on a dynamically specified "training set" of examples. |
