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92-453: It differs from regular text-to-speech programs in that it gives users more control over settings like tempo , pitch , and intonation . Voiceroid uses an engine called AITalk developed by AI Inc. The user is able to adjust the tempo , pitch , and intonation to make the program sound more natural. The original two products, Tsukuyomi Shouta and Tsukuyomi Ai, were packaged with the animating software, Crazy Talk SE. On October 22, 2010,

184-489: A clause is a constituent or phrase that comprises a semantic predicand (expressed or not) and a semantic predicate . A typical clause consists of a subject and a syntactic predicate , the latter typically a verb phrase composed of a verb with or without any objects and other modifiers . However, the subject is sometimes unexpressed if it is easily deducible from the context, especially in null-subject language but also in other languages, including instances of

276-462: A 1791 paper. This machine added models of the tongue and lips, enabling it to produce consonants as well as vowels. In 1837, Charles Wheatstone produced a "speaking machine" based on von Kempelen's design, and in 1846, Joseph Faber exhibited the " Euphonia ". In 1923, Paget resurrected Wheatstone's design. In the 1930s, Bell Labs developed the vocoder , which automatically analyzed speech into its fundamental tones and resonances. From his work on

368-410: A constituent question. They are also prevalent, though, as relative pronouns, in which case they serve to introduce a relative clause and are not part of a question. The wh -word focuses a particular constituent, and most of the time, it appears in clause-initial position. The following examples illustrate standard interrogative wh -clauses. The b-sentences are direct questions (independent clauses), and

460-482: A database of speech samples. They can therefore be used in embedded systems , where memory and microprocessor power are especially limited. Because formant-based systems have complete control of all aspects of the output speech, a wide variety of prosodies and intonations can be output, conveying not just questions and statements, but a variety of emotions and tones of voice. Examples of non-real-time but highly accurate intonation control in formant synthesis include

552-477: A distinctive trait that is a prominent characteristic of their syntactic form. The position of the finite verb is one major trait used for classification, and the appearance of a specific type of focusing word (e.g. 'Wh'-word ) is another. These two criteria overlap to an extent, which means that often no single aspect of syntactic form is always decisive in deciding how the clause functions. There are, however, strong tendencies. Standard SV-clauses (subject-verb) are

644-415: A female voice. Kurzweil predicted in 2005 that as the cost-performance ratio caused speech synthesizers to become cheaper and more accessible, more people would benefit from the use of text-to-speech programs. The most important qualities of a speech synthesis system are naturalness and intelligibility . Naturalness describes how closely the output sounds like human speech, while intelligibility

736-543: A home computer. Many computer operating systems have included speech synthesizers since the early 1990s. A text-to-speech system (or "engine") is composed of two parts: a front-end and a back-end . The front-end has two major tasks. First, it converts raw text containing symbols like numbers and abbreviations into the equivalent of written-out words. This process is often called text normalization , pre-processing , or tokenization . The front-end then assigns phonetic transcriptions to each word, and divides and marks

828-485: A lack of universally agreed objective evaluation criteria. Different organizations often use different speech data. The quality of speech synthesis systems also depends on the quality of the production technique (which may involve analogue or digital recording) and on the facilities used to replay the speech. Evaluating speech synthesis systems has therefore often been compromised by differences between production techniques and replay facilities. Clause In language ,

920-486: A mixed group. In English they can be standard SV-clauses if they are introduced by that or lack a relative pronoun entirely, or they can be wh -clauses if they are introduced by a wh -word that serves as a relative pronoun . Embedded clauses can be categorized according to their syntactic function in terms of predicate-argument structures. They can function as arguments , as adjuncts , or as predicative expressions . That is, embedded clauses can be an argument of

1012-401: A more mature audience and is the first of the series to have no form of censorship. Yuzuki Yukari was also the first Vocaloid to have a Voiceroid voicebank. For Tohoku Zunko's release the software was vastly improved compared to previous Voiceroid+ voices. The first two Voiceroids to come in one package are Kotonoha Akane and Aoi. In 2015, the software was upgraded to Voiceroid+ EX . In 2017,

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1104-412: A new version of the engine was introduced, known as Voiceroid+ . The first voicebank released for this new engine featured a character from the children's anime Eagle Talon , known as Yoshida-kun. Much like Shouta and Ai, he is aimed at young audiences. The first three Voiceroids were subject to censorship, and inappropriate words were filtered out. However, Tsurumaki Maki was designed specifically for

1196-475: A non-finite clause is usually a non-finite verb (as opposed to a finite verb ). There are various types of non-finite clauses that can be acknowledged based in part on the type of non-finite verb at hand. Gerunds are widely acknowledged to constitute non-finite clauses, and some modern grammars also judge many to -infinitives to be the structural locus of non-finite clauses. Finally, some modern grammars also acknowledge so-called small clauses , which often lack

1288-484: A number based on surrounding words, numbers, and punctuation, and sometimes the system provides a way to specify the context if it is ambiguous. Roman numerals can also be read differently depending on context. For example, "Henry VIII" reads as "Henry the Eighth", while "Chapter VIII" reads as "Chapter Eight". Similarly, abbreviations can be ambiguous. For example, the abbreviation "in" for "inches" must be differentiated from

1380-522: A predicate, an adjunct on a predicate, or (part of) the predicate itself. The predicate in question is usually the predicate of an independent clause, but embedding of predicates is also frequent. A clause that functions as the argument of a given predicate is known as an argument clause . Argument clauses can appear as subjects, as objects, and as obliques. They can also modify a noun predicate, in which case they are known as content clauses . The following examples illustrate argument clauses that provide

1472-607: A specialized software that enabled it to read Italian. A second version, released in 1978, was also able to sing Italian in an " a cappella " style. Dominant systems in the 1980s and 1990s were the DECtalk system, based largely on the work of Dennis Klatt at MIT, and the Bell Labs system; the latter was one of the first multilingual language-independent systems, making extensive use of natural language processing methods. Handheld electronics featuring speech synthesis began emerging in

1564-465: A specific tense. A primary division for the discussion of clauses is the distinction between independent clauses and dependent clauses . An independent clause can stand alone, i.e. it can constitute a complete sentence by itself. A dependent clause, by contrast, relies on an independent clause's presence to be efficiently utilizable. A second significant distinction concerns the difference between finite and non-finite clauses. A finite clause contains

1656-450: A structurally central finite verb , whereas the structurally central word of a non-finite clause is often a non-finite verb . Traditional grammar focuses on finite clauses, the awareness of non-finite clauses having arisen much later in connection with the modern study of syntax. The discussion here also focuses on finite clauses, although some aspects of non-finite clauses are considered further below. Clauses can be classified according to

1748-428: A superordinate expression. The first is a dependent of the main verb of the matrix clause and the second is a dependent of the object noun. The arrow dependency edges identify them as adjuncts. The arrow points away from the adjunct towards it governor to indicate that semantic selection is running counter to the direction of the syntactic dependency; the adjunct is selecting its governor. The next four trees illustrate

1840-411: A synthesizer can incorporate a model of the vocal tract and other human voice characteristics to create a completely "synthetic" voice output. The quality of a speech synthesizer is judged by its similarity to the human voice and by its ability to be understood clearly. An intelligible text-to-speech program allows people with visual impairments or reading disabilities to listen to written words on

1932-463: A tool developed by ElevenLabs to create voice deepfakes that defeated a bank's voice-authentication system. The process of normalizing text is rarely straightforward. Texts are full of heteronyms , numbers , and abbreviations that all require expansion into a phonetic representation. There are many spellings in English which are pronounced differently based on context. For example, "My latest project

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2024-400: A verb altogether. It should be apparent that non-finite clauses are (by and large) embedded clauses. The underlined words in the following examples are considered non-finite clauses, e.g. Each of the gerunds in the a-sentences ( stopping , attempting , and cheating ) constitutes a non-finite clause. The subject-predicate relationship that has long been taken as the defining trait of clauses

2116-438: A waveguide or transmission-line analog of the human oral and nasal tracts controlled by Carré's "distinctive region model". More recent synthesizers, developed by Jorge C. Lucero and colleagues, incorporate models of vocal fold biomechanics, glottal aerodynamics and acoustic wave propagation in the bronchi, trachea, nasal and oral cavities, and thus constitute full systems of physics-based speech simulation. HMM-based synthesis

2208-411: A yes/no-question via subject–auxiliary inversion , 2. they express a condition as an embedded clause, or 3. they express a command via imperative mood, e.g. Most verb first clauses are independent clauses. Verb first conditional clauses, however, must be classified as embedded clauses because they cannot stand alone. In English , Wh -clauses contain a wh -word. Wh -words often serve to help express

2300-411: Is speech recognition . Synthesized speech can be created by concatenating pieces of recorded speech that are stored in a database . Systems differ in the size of the stored speech units; a system that stores phones or diphones provides the largest output range, but may lack clarity. For specific usage domains, the storage of entire words or sentences allows for high-quality output. Alternatively,

2392-415: Is a relative clause, e.g. An embedded clause can also function as a predicative expression . That is, it can form (part of) the predicate of a greater clause. These predicative clauses are functioning just like other predicative expressions, e.g. predicative adjectives ( That was good ) and predicative nominals ( That was the truth ). They form the matrix predicate together with the copula . Some of

2484-442: Is a synthesis method based on hidden Markov models , also called Statistical Parametric Synthesis. In this system, the frequency spectrum ( vocal tract ), fundamental frequency (voice source), and duration ( prosody ) of speech are modeled simultaneously by HMMs. Speech waveforms are generated from HMMs themselves based on the maximum likelihood criterion. Sinewave synthesis is a technique for synthesizing speech by replacing

2576-406: Is an important technology for speech synthesis and coding, and in the 1990s was adopted by almost all international speech coding standards as an essential component, contributing to the enhancement of digital speech communication over mobile channels and the internet. In 1975, MUSA was released, and was one of the first Speech Synthesis systems. It consisted of a stand-alone computer hardware and

2668-461: Is another problem that TTS systems have to address. It is a simple programming challenge to convert a number into words (at least in English), like "1325" becoming "one thousand three hundred twenty-five". However, numbers occur in many different contexts; "1325" may also be read as "one three two five", "thirteen twenty-five" or "thirteen hundred and twenty five". A TTS system can often infer how to expand

2760-531: Is built to adjust the intonation and pacing of delivery based on the context of language input used. It uses advanced algorithms to analyze the contextual aspects of text, aiming to detect emotions like anger, sadness, happiness, or alarm, which enables the system to understand the user's sentiment, resulting in a more realistic and human-like inflection. Other features include multilingual speech generation and long-form content creation with contextually-aware voices. The DNN-based speech synthesizers are approaching

2852-423: Is contained in the speech database. At runtime, the target prosody of a sentence is superimposed on these minimal units by means of digital signal processing techniques such as linear predictive coding , PSOLA or MBROLA . or more recent techniques such as pitch modification in the source domain using discrete cosine transform . Diphone synthesis suffers from the sonic glitches of concatenative synthesis and

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2944-514: Is fully present in the a-sentences. The fact that the b-sentences are also acceptable illustrates the enigmatic behavior of gerunds. They seem to straddle two syntactic categories: they can function as non-finite verbs or as nouns. When they function as nouns as in the b-sentences, it is debatable whether they constitute clauses, since nouns are not generally taken to be constitutive of clauses. Some modern theories of syntax take many to -infinitives to be constitutive of non-finite clauses. This stance

3036-504: Is not always the goal of a speech synthesis system, and formant synthesis systems have advantages over concatenative systems. Formant-synthesized speech can be reliably intelligible, even at very high speeds, avoiding the acoustic glitches that commonly plague concatenative systems. High-speed synthesized speech is used by the visually impaired to quickly navigate computers using a screen reader . Formant synthesizers are usually smaller programs than concatenative systems because they do not have

3128-406: Is quick and accurate, but completely fails if it is given a word which is not in its dictionary. As dictionary size grows, so too does the memory space requirements of the synthesis system. On the other hand, the rule-based approach works on any input, but the complexity of the rules grows substantially as the system takes into account irregular spellings or pronunciations. (Consider that the word "of"

3220-415: Is quite successful for many cases such as whether "read" should be pronounced as "red" implying past tense, or as "reed" implying present tense. Typical error rates when using HMMs in this fashion are usually below five percent. These techniques also work well for most European languages, although access to required training corpora is frequently difficult in these languages. Deciding how to convert numbers

3312-448: Is realized as /ˌklɪəɹˈʌʊt/ ). Likewise in French , many final consonants become no longer silent if followed by a word that begins with a vowel, an effect called liaison . This alternation cannot be reproduced by a simple word-concatenation system, which would require additional complexity to be context-sensitive . Formant synthesis does not use human speech samples at runtime. Instead,

3404-407: Is segmented into some or all of the following: individual phones , diphones , half-phones, syllables , morphemes , words , phrases , and sentences . Typically, the division into segments is done using a specially modified speech recognizer set to a "forced alignment" mode with some manual correction afterward, using visual representations such as the waveform and spectrogram . An index of

3496-522: Is stored by the program. Determining the correct pronunciation of each word is a matter of looking up each word in the dictionary and replacing the spelling with the pronunciation specified in the dictionary. The other approach is rule-based, in which pronunciation rules are applied to words to determine their pronunciations based on their spellings. This is similar to the "sounding out", or synthetic phonics , approach to learning reading. Each approach has advantages and drawbacks. The dictionary-based approach

3588-433: Is supported by the clear predicate status of many to -infinitives. It is challenged, however, by the fact that to -infinitives do not take an overt subject, e.g. The to -infinitives to consider and to explain clearly qualify as predicates (because they can be negated). They do not, however, take overt subjects. The subjects she and he are dependents of the matrix verbs refuses and attempted , respectively, not of

3680-761: Is the NeXT -based system originally developed and marketed by Trillium Sound Research, a spin-off company of the University of Calgary , where much of the original research was conducted. Following the demise of the various incarnations of NeXT (started by Steve Jobs in the late 1980s and merged with Apple Computer in 1997), the Trillium software was published under the GNU General Public License, with work continuing as gnuspeech . The system, first marketed in 1994, provides full articulatory-based text-to-speech conversion using

3772-438: Is the ease with which the output is understood. The ideal speech synthesizer is both natural and intelligible. Speech synthesis systems usually try to maximize both characteristics. The two primary technologies generating synthetic speech waveforms are concatenative synthesis and formant synthesis . Each technology has strengths and weaknesses, and the intended uses of a synthesis system will typically determine which approach

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3864-622: Is to learn how to better project my voice" contains two pronunciations of "project". Most text-to-speech (TTS) systems do not generate semantic representations of their input texts, as processes for doing so are unreliable, poorly understood, and computationally ineffective. As a result, various heuristic techniques are used to guess the proper way to disambiguate homographs , like examining neighboring words and using statistics about frequency of occurrence. Recently TTS systems have begun to use HMMs (discussed above ) to generate " parts of speech " to aid in disambiguating homographs. This technique

3956-566: Is used. Concatenative synthesis is based on the concatenation (stringing together) of segments of recorded speech. Generally, concatenative synthesis produces the most natural-sounding synthesized speech. However, differences between natural variations in speech and the nature of the automated techniques for segmenting the waveforms sometimes result in audible glitches in the output. There are three main sub-types of concatenative synthesis. Unit selection synthesis uses large databases of recorded speech. During database creation, each recorded utterance

4048-408: Is very common in English, yet is the only word in which the letter "f" is pronounced [v] .) As a result, nearly all speech synthesis systems use a combination of these approaches. Languages with a phonemic orthography have a very regular writing system, and the prediction of the pronunciation of words based on their spellings is quite successful. Speech synthesis systems for such languages often use

4140-446: Is very simple to implement, and has been in commercial use for a long time, in devices like talking clocks and calculators. The level of naturalness of these systems can be very high because the variety of sentence types is limited, and they closely match the prosody and intonation of the original recordings. Because these systems are limited by the words and phrases in their databases, they are not general-purpose and can only synthesize

4232-685: The German - Danish scientist Christian Gottlieb Kratzenstein won the first prize in a competition announced by the Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences and Arts for models he built of the human vocal tract that could produce the five long vowel sounds (in International Phonetic Alphabet notation: [aː] , [eː] , [iː] , [oː] and [uː] ). There followed the bellows -operated " acoustic-mechanical speech machine " of Wolfgang von Kempelen of Pressburg , Hungary, described in

4324-622: The HAL 9000 computer sings the same song as astronaut Dave Bowman puts it to sleep. Despite the success of purely electronic speech synthesis, research into mechanical speech-synthesizers continues. Linear predictive coding (LPC), a form of speech coding , began development with the work of Fumitada Itakura of Nagoya University and Shuzo Saito of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) in 1966. Further developments in LPC technology were made by Bishnu S. Atal and Manfred R. Schroeder at Bell Labs during

4416-446: The emotion of a generated line using emotional contextualizers (a term coined by this project), a sentence or phrase that conveys the emotion of the take that serves as a guide for the model during inference. ElevenLabs is primarily known for its browser-based , AI-assisted text-to-speech software, Speech Synthesis, which can produce lifelike speech by synthesizing vocal emotion and intonation . The company states its software

4508-492: The formants (main bands of energy) with pure tone whistles. Deep learning speech synthesis uses deep neural networks (DNN) to produce artificial speech from text (text-to-speech) or spectrum (vocoder). The deep neural networks are trained using a large amount of recorded speech and, in the case of a text-to-speech system, the associated labels and/or input text. 15.ai uses a multi-speaker model —hundreds of voices are trained concurrently rather than sequentially, decreasing

4600-488: The imperative mood in English . A complete simple sentence contains a single clause with a finite verb . Complex sentences contain at least one clause subordinated ( dependent ) to an independent clause (one that could stand alone as a simple sentence), which may be co-ordinated with other independents with or without dependents. Some dependent clauses are non-finite , i.e. they do not contain any element/verb marking

4692-404: The to -infinitives. Data like these are often addressed in terms of control . The matrix predicates refuses and attempted are control verbs; they control the embedded predicates consider and explain , which means they determine which of their arguments serves as the subject argument of the embedded predicate. Some theories of syntax posit the null subject PRO (i.e. pronoun) to help address

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4784-587: The wh -word is a dependent of the finite verb, whereas it is the head over the finite verb in the embedded wh -clauses. There has been confusion about the distinction between clauses and phrases . This confusion is due in part to how these concepts are employed in the phrase structure grammars of the Chomskyan tradition. In the 1970s, Chomskyan grammars began labeling many clauses as CPs (i.e. complementizer phrases) or as IPs (i.e. inflection phrases), and then later as TPs (i.e. tense phrases), etc. The choice of labels

4876-640: The 1970s. LPC was later the basis for early speech synthesizer chips, such as the Texas Instruments LPC Speech Chips used in the Speak & Spell toys from 1978. In 1975, Fumitada Itakura developed the line spectral pairs (LSP) method for high-compression speech coding, while at NTT. From 1975 to 1981, Itakura studied problems in speech analysis and synthesis based on the LSP method. In 1980, his team developed an LSP-based speech synthesizer chip. LSP

4968-677: The 1970s. One of the first was the Telesensory Systems Inc. (TSI) Speech+ portable calculator for the blind in 1976. Other devices had primarily educational purposes, such as the Speak & Spell toy produced by Texas Instruments in 1978. Fidelity released a speaking version of its electronic chess computer in 1979. The first video game to feature speech synthesis was the 1980 shoot 'em up arcade game , Stratovox (known in Japan as Speak & Rescue ), from Sun Electronics . The first personal computer game with speech synthesis

5060-469: The TTS system has been tuned. However, maximum naturalness typically require unit-selection speech databases to be very large, in some systems ranging into the gigabytes of recorded data, representing dozens of hours of speech. Also, unit selection algorithms have been known to select segments from a place that results in less than ideal synthesis (e.g. minor words become unclear) even when a better choice exists in

5152-542: The absence of subject-auxiliary inversion in embedded clauses, as illustrated in the c-examples just produced. Subject-auxiliary inversion is obligatory in matrix clauses when something other than the subject is focused, but it never occurs in embedded clauses regardless of the constituent that is focused. A systematic distinction in word order emerges across matrix wh -clauses, which can have VS order, and embedded wh -clauses, which always maintain SV order, e.g. Relative clauses are

5244-701: The acoustic patterns of speech in the form of a spectrogram back into sound. Using this device, Alvin Liberman and colleagues discovered acoustic cues for the perception of phonetic segments (consonants and vowels). The first computer-based speech-synthesis systems originated in the late 1950s. Noriko Umeda et al. developed the first general English text-to-speech system in 1968, at the Electrotechnical Laboratory in Japan. In 1961, physicist John Larry Kelly, Jr and his colleague Louis Gerstman used an IBM 704 computer to synthesize speech, an event among

5336-485: The actual status of the syntactic units to which the labels are attached. A more traditional understanding of clauses and phrases maintains that phrases are not clauses, and clauses are not phrases. There is a progression in the size and status of syntactic units: words < phrases < clauses . The characteristic trait of clauses, i.e. the presence of a subject and a (finite) verb, is absent from phrases. Clauses can be, however, embedded inside phrases. The central word of

5428-440: The appropriate intonation contour and/or the appearance of a question word, e.g. Examples like these demonstrate that how a clause functions cannot be known based entirely on a single distinctive syntactic criterion. SV-clauses are usually declarative, but intonation and/or the appearance of a question word can render them interrogative or exclamative. Verb first clauses in English usually play one of three roles: 1. They express

5520-412: The c-sentences contain the corresponding indirect questions (embedded clauses): One important aspect of matrix wh -clauses is that subject-auxiliary inversion is obligatory when something other than the subject is focused. When it is the subject (or something embedded in the subject) that is focused, however, subject-auxiliary inversion does not occur. Another important aspect of wh -clauses concerns

5612-412: The combinations of words and phrases with which they have been preprogrammed. The blending of words within naturally spoken language however can still cause problems unless the many variations are taken into account. For example, in non-rhotic dialects of English the "r" in words like "clear" /ˈklɪə/ is usually only pronounced when the following word has a vowel as its first letter (e.g. "clear out"

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5704-522: The content of a noun. Such argument clauses are content clauses: The content clauses like these in the a-sentences are arguments. Relative clauses introduced by the relative pronoun that as in the b-clauses here have an outward appearance that is closely similar to that of content clauses. The relative clauses are adjuncts, however, not arguments. Adjunct clauses are embedded clauses that modify an entire predicate-argument structure. All clause types (SV-, verb first, wh- ) can function as adjuncts, although

5796-478: The database. Recently, researchers have proposed various automated methods to detect unnatural segments in unit-selection speech synthesis systems. Diphone synthesis uses a minimal speech database containing all the diphones (sound-to-sound transitions) occurring in a language. The number of diphones depends on the phonotactics of the language: for example, Spanish has about 800 diphones, and German about 2500. In diphone synthesis, only one example of each diphone

5888-416: The distinction mentioned above between matrix wh -clauses and embedded wh -clauses The embedded wh -clause is an object argument each time. The position of the wh -word across the matrix clauses (a-trees) and the embedded clauses (b-trees) captures the difference in word order. Matrix wh -clauses have V2 word order , whereas embedded wh-clauses have (what amounts to) V3 word order. In the matrix clauses,

5980-405: The distinctions presented above are represented in syntax trees. These trees make the difference between main and subordinate clauses very clear, and they also illustrate well the difference between argument and adjunct clauses. The following dependency grammar trees show that embedded clauses are dependent on an element in the independent clause, often on a verb: The independent clause comprises

6072-578: The entire trees in both instances, whereas the embedded clauses constitute arguments of the respective independent clauses: the embedded wh -clause what we want is the object argument of the predicate know ; the embedded clause that he is gaining is the subject argument of the predicate is motivating . Both of these argument clauses are dependent on the verb of the matrix clause. The following trees identify adjunct clauses using an arrow dependency edge: These two embedded clauses are adjunct clauses because they provide circumstantial information that modifies

6164-459: The facts of control constructions, e.g. With the presence of PRO as a null subject, to -infinitives can be construed as complete clauses, since both subject and predicate are present. PRO-theory is particular to one tradition in the study of syntax and grammar ( Government and Binding Theory , Minimalist Program ). Other theories of syntax and grammar (e.g. Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar , Construction Grammar , dependency grammar ) reject

6256-425: The greatest naturalness, because it applies only a small amount of digital signal processing (DSP) to the recorded speech. DSP often makes recorded speech sound less natural, although some systems use a small amount of signal processing at the point of concatenation to smooth the waveform. The output from the best unit-selection systems is often indistinguishable from real human voices, especially in contexts for which

6348-563: The human vocal tract and the articulation processes occurring there. The first articulatory synthesizer regularly used for laboratory experiments was developed at Haskins Laboratories in the mid-1970s by Philip Rubin , Tom Baer, and Paul Mermelstein. This synthesizer, known as ASY, was based on vocal tract models developed at Bell Laboratories in the 1960s and 1970s by Paul Mermelstein, Cecil Coker, and colleagues. Until recently, articulatory synthesis models have not been incorporated into commercial speech synthesis systems. A notable exception

6440-573: The main source of funding for new voicebanks. Voiceroid Voiceroid+ Voiceroid + EX Speech synthesis This is an accepted version of this page Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech . A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer , and can be implemented in software or hardware products. A text-to-speech ( TTS ) system converts normal language text into speech; other systems render symbolic linguistic representations like phonetic transcriptions into speech. The reverse process

6532-517: The most prominent in the history of Bell Labs . Kelly's voice recorder synthesizer ( vocoder ) recreated the song " Daisy Bell ", with musical accompaniment from Max Mathews . Coincidentally, Arthur C. Clarke was visiting his friend and colleague John Pierce at the Bell Labs Murray Hill facility. Clarke was so impressed by the demonstration that he used it in the climactic scene of his screenplay for his novel 2001: A Space Odyssey , where

6624-531: The naturalness of the human voice. Examples of disadvantages of the method are low robustness when the data are not sufficient, lack of controllability and low performance in auto-regressive models. For tonal languages, such as Chinese or Taiwanese language, there are different levels of tone sandhi required and sometimes the output of speech synthesizer may result in the mistakes of tone sandhi. In 2023, VICE reporter Joseph Cox published findings that he had recorded five minutes of himself talking and then used

6716-402: The newest version of the software, "Voiceroid 2", was announced. This version has a number of new features and differences, though users can still import the past Voiceroid and its variants into it. However, older engine versions will not be able to use any new features. A number of releases for the software have been produced after successful crowdfunding campaigns; since 2016, this has become

6808-410: The norm in English. They are usually declarative (as opposed to exclamative, imperative, or interrogative); they express information neutrally, e.g. Declarative clauses like these are by far the most frequently occurring type of clause in any language. They can be viewed as basic, with other clause types being derived from them. Standard SV-clauses can also be interrogative or exclamative, however, given

6900-408: The presence of null elements such as PRO, which means they are likely to reject the stance that to -infinitives constitute clauses. Another type of construction that some schools of syntax and grammar view as non-finite clauses is the so-called small clause . A typical small clause consists of a noun phrase and a predicative expression, e.g. The subject-predicate relationship is clearly present in

6992-412: The pronunciation of a word based on its spelling , a process which is often called text-to-phoneme or grapheme -to-phoneme conversion ( phoneme is the term used by linguists to describe distinctive sounds in a language ). The simplest approach to text-to-phoneme conversion is the dictionary-based approach, where a large dictionary containing all the words of a language and their correct pronunciations

7084-403: The required training time and enabling the model to learn and generalize shared emotional context, even for voices with no exposure to such emotional context. The deep learning model used by the application is nondeterministic : each time that speech is generated from the same string of text, the intonation of the speech will be slightly different. The application also supports manually altering

7176-512: The robotic-sounding nature of formant synthesis, and has few of the advantages of either approach other than small size. As such, its use in commercial applications is declining, although it continues to be used in research because there are a number of freely available software implementations. An early example of Diphone synthesis is a teaching robot, Leachim , that was invented by Michael J. Freeman . Leachim contained information regarding class curricular and certain biographical information about

7268-524: The rule-based method extensively, resorting to dictionaries only for those few words, like foreign names and loanwords, whose pronunciations are not obvious from their spellings. On the other hand, speech synthesis systems for languages like English, which have extremely irregular spelling systems, are more likely to rely on dictionaries, and to use rule-based methods only for unusual words, or words that are not in their dictionaries. The consistent evaluation of speech synthesis systems may be difficult because of

7360-661: The same year. In 1976, Computalker Consultants released their CT-1 Speech Synthesizer. Designed by D. Lloyd Rice and Jim Cooper, it was an analog synthesizer built to work with microcomputers using the S-100 bus standard. Early electronic speech-synthesizers sounded robotic and were often barely intelligible. The quality of synthesized speech has steadily improved, but as of 2016 output from contemporary speech synthesis systems remains clearly distinguishable from actual human speech. Synthesized voices typically sounded male until 1990, when Ann Syrdal , at AT&T Bell Laboratories , created

7452-399: The stereotypical adjunct clause is SV and introduced by a subordinator (i.e. subordinate conjunction , e.g. after , because , before , now , etc.), e.g. These adjunct clauses modify the entire matrix clause. Thus before you did in the first example modifies the matrix clause Fred arrived . Adjunct clauses can also modify a nominal predicate. The typical instance of this type of adjunct

7544-450: The students whom it was programmed to teach. It was tested in a fourth grade classroom in the Bronx, New York . Domain-specific synthesis concatenates prerecorded words and phrases to create complete utterances. It is used in applications where the variety of texts the system will output is limited to a particular domain, like transit schedule announcements or weather reports. The technology

7636-530: The symbolic linguistic representation into sound. In certain systems, this part includes the computation of the target prosody (pitch contour, phoneme durations), which is then imposed on the output speech. Long before the invention of electronic signal processing , some people tried to build machines to emulate human speech. There were also legends of the existence of " Brazen Heads ", such as those involving Pope Silvester II (d. 1003 AD), Albertus Magnus (1198–1280), and Roger Bacon (1214–1294). In 1779,

7728-563: The synthesized speech output is created using additive synthesis and an acoustic model ( physical modelling synthesis ). Parameters such as fundamental frequency , voicing , and noise levels are varied over time to create a waveform of artificial speech. This method is sometimes called rules-based synthesis ; however, many concatenative systems also have rules-based components. Many systems based on formant synthesis technology generate artificial, robotic-sounding speech that would never be mistaken for human speech. However, maximum naturalness

7820-405: The text into prosodic units , like phrases , clauses , and sentences . The process of assigning phonetic transcriptions to words is called text-to-phoneme or grapheme -to-phoneme conversion. Phonetic transcriptions and prosody information together make up the symbolic linguistic representation that is output by the front-end. The back-end—often referred to as the synthesizer —then converts

7912-414: The underlined strings. The expression on the right is a predication over the noun phrase immediately to its left. While the subject-predicate relationship is indisputably present, the underlined strings do not behave as single constituents , a fact that undermines their status as clauses. Hence one can debate whether the underlined strings in these examples should qualify as clauses. The layered structures of

8004-447: The units in the speech database is then created based on the segmentation and acoustic parameters like the fundamental frequency ( pitch ), duration, position in the syllable, and neighboring phones. At run time , the desired target utterance is created by determining the best chain of candidate units from the database (unit selection). This process is typically achieved using a specially weighted decision tree . Unit selection provides

8096-491: The vocoder, Homer Dudley developed a keyboard-operated voice-synthesizer called The Voder (Voice Demonstrator), which he exhibited at the 1939 New York World's Fair . Dr. Franklin S. Cooper and his colleagues at Haskins Laboratories built the Pattern playback in the late 1940s and completed it in 1950. There were several different versions of this hardware device; only one currently survives. The machine converts pictures of

8188-446: The word "in", and the address "12 St John St." uses the same abbreviation for both "Saint" and "Street". TTS systems with intelligent front ends can make educated guesses about ambiguous abbreviations, while others provide the same result in all cases, resulting in nonsensical (and sometimes comical) outputs, such as " Ulysses S. Grant " being rendered as "Ulysses South Grant". Speech synthesis systems use two basic approaches to determine

8280-570: The work done in the late 1970s for the Texas Instruments toy Speak & Spell , and in the early 1980s Sega arcade machines and in many Atari, Inc. arcade games using the TMS5220 LPC Chips . Creating proper intonation for these projects was painstaking, and the results have yet to be matched by real-time text-to-speech interfaces. Articulatory synthesis consists of computational techniques for synthesizing speech based on models of

8372-463: Was Manbiki Shoujo ( Shoplifting Girl ), released in 1980 for the PET 2001 , for which the game's developer, Hiroshi Suzuki, developed a " zero cross " programming technique to produce a synthesized speech waveform. Another early example, the arcade version of Berzerk , also dates from 1980. The Milton Bradley Company produced the first multi-player electronic game using voice synthesis, Milton , in

8464-484: Was influenced by the theory-internal desire to use the labels consistently. The X-bar schema acknowledged at least three projection levels for every lexical head: a minimal projection (e.g. N, V, P, etc.), an intermediate projection (e.g. N', V', P', etc.), and a phrase level projection (e.g. NP, VP, PP, etc.). Extending this convention to the clausal categories occurred in the interest of the consistent use of labels. This use of labels should not, however, be confused with

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