Essay on Speech Synthesizers

Speech synthesis is a stable technology nowadays although its results are from the human speech production. It can be used in a wide range of low cost applications. Speech recognition is beginning to have a broad impact; nevertheless, it is still inadequate when compared to human capabilities. The development of man-machine interfaces for personal computer mediated communicators seems to be the most promising application area of speech recognition. Speech dialogue systems will also play an important role in human-computer interaction. I believe that Medicare should fund speech recognition systems for stroke patients and people with disability.

Speech Synthesis
Although the intelligibility of the available speech synthesis systems is generally high for a number of languages, there is evidence from recent work that a new level of quality, based on a number of new techniques, might be possible in speech synthesis for text-to-speech systems. The focus is on naturalness, prosody and flexibility (different voices or voice personalities, speaking styles, dialects, accents and languages). Improved models will open the way to more realistic synthesis of child and female voices. Other important research areas are modelling of emotions and speech synthesis from the meaning. The quality and intelligibility of synthetic or natural speech are usually very difficult tasks to measure, but recently progress has been made in this field.

Applications for Stroke Patients Disabled People

The estimated number of people with speech/language difficulties living in the European Union (1993) is just over three quarters of a million people and is projected to rise by a further seven thousand by the year 2000. The materials and methods used for obtaining the results are the same as in (Carruthers et al., 1993).
Speech technology has contributed to more realistic user interfaces, especially in the area of computer and telecommunications technology (Rabiner, 1994)..................

ESSAYS ON TECHNOLOGY