What is a speech synthesizer?
Until recently, speech synthesizers have only been hardware devices that output the contents of a computer video display in synthetic speech. The hardware is either in the form of a circuit card or an external peripheral device. Some good and highly reliable hardware synthesizers can cost as little as $300. More expensive speech synthesizers can cost more than $1,000. Recently, Windows 95 users (and above) have been able to use software that transforms their sound cards into speech synthesizer. This solution is less expensive than using a hardware synthesizer. It is also perfect for laptop users who no longer need to cart around an external synthesizer or use a valuable card slot. There are a few pitfalls with software-based synthesizers, which some call soft synth. A few end users report that the response time is not as fast with a software synthesizer as compared to a hardware synthesizer. Software synthesizers generally don’t work with DOS operating systems. When they do at all, the
The monitor an the printer are output devices. They allow the computer to communicate information to the operator. They present the computer data visually to the user. Similarly, the speech synthesizer is an output device. It communicates information and data to the computer operator. Instead of presenting it visually, the speech synthesizer employs sound to communicate with the operator by ear. It uses either a specialized kind of sound card, or the normal sound card on the computer to create realistic human-like speech. My speech synthesizer is called the Dectalk2 PC internal. DECtalk PC is a PC option board, which in this case is a specialized sound card and a set of software components which, when properly loaded on a DOS or Windows personal computer, willprovide synthesized voice output of ASCII text sent to it by other PC software applications such as “screen readers”. The interface to DECtalk PC for both commands and text is via a memory-resident DOS driver. That just means the
A speech synthesizer is an electronic device that converts text characters into artificial speech. They most frequently use pronunciation rules for translating text to speech. The quality of synthetic speech ranges from close to lifelike to robotic sounding speech found in lower end speech synthesizers.
The speech synthesizer is device that is used to translate text characters into sounds that approximate the sound of human speech. Depending on the level of sophistication of the individual device, the sounds produced may be somewhat stilted and artificial sounding, or sound very much like the voice of a real person. The concept of speech synthesis has been around for centuries, but only in recent decades has the process become available to the general public. There are examples of attempts to artificially produce human speech patterns that go back to the 11th century. The earliest attempts often used materials to replicate human vocal cords and apply various types of stimulation in order to produce sounds. Over time, designs made it possible to produce sounds that mimicked the pronunciation of vowels. By the latter part of the 18th century, a few designs were also able to produce sounds that closely resembled consonants. The real progress with the modern speech synthesizer began in th
