TABLE OF CONTENTS In previous chapters speech technologies and their associated issues were viewed from the perspective of quality design. Individual systems were mainly handled like black boxes . Design objectives were set and illustrated by examples, and the influence of prerequisites and conditions on the feasibility of reaching these goals was discussed.
This chapter will look at a glass box approach of speech technology systems, using speech synthesis as an example. One part of this will include a detailed description of system input, architecture and output.
In general, the term speech synthesis is understood as a transformation of information coded other than acoustically into acoustic speech signals. In literature ambiguous terminology has arisen: The term speech synthesis is frequently synonymous with synthesis-by-concept , text-to-speech conversion or voice generation techniques Only when synthesis is clearly coupled with a further restrictive human performance (e.g. dialog, transmission or translation systems) is this part of the system clearly defined and named by an internal border (cf. [22], [185], [259], [260]).
In this book the term synthesis is synonymous with speech device . Synthesis is used as a hypernym when it is not necessary to differentiate between systems of varying performances. If a differentiation has to be made, it is done according to different system inputs:
translated text-to-speech synthesis
dialog-to-speech synthesis
concept-to-speech synthesis
text-to-speech synthesis
phoneme-to-speech synthesis
manually operated synthesis
It is easy to recognize that there are considerable differences between the system complexity of...
