초록
Text-to-Speech(WS) 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 for 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 current speech synthesizers are believed to be acceptable to normal users. These are partly why the MPEG group had decided to include the WS technology as one of its MPEG-4 functionalities. ETRI has made major contributions to the current MPEG-4 775 appearing in various MPEG-4 documents with relatively minor contributions from AT&T and NW. Main MPEG-4 functionalities presently available are; 1) use of original prosody for synthesized speech output, 2) trick mode functions for general users without breaking synthesized speech prosody, 3) interoperability with Facial Animation(FA) tools, and 4) dubbing a moving/anlmated picture with lip-shape pattern informations.
