MPEG-4 TTS (Text-to-Speech)

It cannot be argued that speech is the most natural interfacing tool between men and machines. In order to realize acceptable speech interfaces, highly advanced speech recognizers and synthesizers are inevitable. Text-to-Speech(TTS) technology has been attracting a lot of interest among speech engineers because of its own benefits. Namely, the possible application areas of talking computers, emergency alarming systems in speech, speech output devices fur speech-impaired, and so on. Hence, many researchers have made significant progresses in the speech synthesis techniques in the sense of their own languages and as a result, the quality of currently available speech synthesizers are believed to be acceptable to normal users. These are partly why the MPEG group had decided to include the TTS technology as one of its MPEG-4 functionalities. ETRI has made major contributions to the current MPEG-4 TTS among various MPEG-4 functionalities. They are; 1) use of original prosody for synthesized speech output, 2) trick mode functions fer general users without breaking synthesized speech prosody, 3) interoperability with Facial Animation(FA) tools, and 4) dubbing a moving/animated picture with lib-shape pattern information.