Digital Speech Generation

Page Under Construction

Introduction

Digital Speech Generation, as the name suggests, is the process of making a computer "speak" a sequence of letters/words in a meaningful way.
For English, this is especially hard, because it is a very un-mathematical language.
What I mean by unmathematical, is that the "a" in "apple" is not pronounced the same way as the "a" in "hate". In other words, letters do not sound the same way in different words.
Sure, this might be true for consonants, but vowels, not by a long shot.
Hindi for example, is a little more mathematical. The "आ" in "आप", meaning "you" with respect, will be the same as the "आ" in "आरंभ" which means "start", and this is true for all uses of आ.
If English were the same way, all we would have to do would be to assign a sound to every letter and then just play it.
Unfortunately, its not that simple.
What is done, is to use another type of alphabet, the phonetic alphabet, which basically assigns a sound to every alphabet within it, and in doing so, this set of alphabets can generate any sound in the human language (Or can they?). http://www.langsci.ucl.ac.uk/ipa/pulmonic.html

While the page gets worked on, here are some really cool web-pages about speech and phonetics that I came across in my research:
- The Upenn course slides are particularly good. http://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/Fall_2008/ling520/week1/week1.pdf .You can change the week number at the end of the hyperlink to access the other slides.
- This page is good to hear what different parts of the phonetic alphabet sound like. http://web.uvic.ca/ling/resources/ipa/charts/IPAlab/IPAlab.htm
- Also, on the UPenn webpage http://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/Fall_2008/ling520/ try the links to the labs they have some interesting stuff

--Dlamba 20:00, 23 October 2009 (UTC)