The influence of rule-generated stress on computer-synthesized speech

✍ Scribed by David L. McPeters; Alan L. Tharp

• Book ID: 104139879
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1984
• Weight: 576 KB
• Volume: 20
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0020-7373
• DOI: 10.1016/s0020-7373(84)80019-x

✦ Synopsis

This paper reports on an investigation to understand better the effects of adding rule-generated stress to the output of a text-to-speech translator. An experiment was conducted in which subjects listened to questions and declaratives formed by computersynthesized speech and responded with an answer to a question or a repetition of a declarative. To determine the effects of stress on the intelligibility of sentences, the subjects were divided into three groups. One group listened to unstressed output; a second group listened to output to which rule-generated stress had been added, while a third group listened to manually-polished synthesized speech.

The results of the experiment are reported together with an analysis and a discussion of their relevance to the improvement of computer-synthesized speech.