Text to Speech Synthesis: New Paradigms and Advances (Prentice Hall Imsc Press Multimedia Series) Book

Text to speech synthesis (TTS) is a critical research and application area in the field of multimedia interfaces. Recent advances in TTS will impact is wide number of disciplines from education, business and entertainment applications to medical aids. Until recently, speech synthesis relied on models and rule-based approaches. While this had yielded intelligible sounding speech, the voice quality was unacceptable for widespread adoption. Fortunately, there has been a major technological paradigm shift recently in how speech synthesis is done: going from rule-based to explicit data-driven methods. Recent advances in computing and corpus driven methodologies have yielded exciting possibilities for research and development in this domain yielding highly natural sounding speech. The book focuses on recent advances and new paradigms in text to speech synthesis contributed by leading experts from both academia and industry from across the world. There is no book of this nature that documents in a comprehensive way the recent research trends. This is not only important for researchers and students of the field but potential customers and other benefactors of the results. The book's chapters address key current topic areas in text to speech synthesis (TTS): Data-driven systems, unit selection Hybrid Schemes: interplay between data-driven and knowledge-based techniques, prosody models and generation and expressive speech synthesis.Read More