• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.4
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• pp.217-225
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• 2013

This paper describes the design and implementation of the kWebAnywhere system based on WebAnywhere, which assists people with severely diminished eye sight and the blind people to access Internet information through Web interfaces. The WebAnywhere is a server-based web reader which reads aloud the web contents using TTS(text-to-speech) technology on the Internet without installing any software on the client's system. The system can be used in general web browsers using a built-in audio function, for blind users who are unable to afford to use a screen reader and for web developers to design web accessibility. However, the WebAnywhere is limited to supporting only a single language and cannot be applied to Korean web contents directly. Thus, in this paper, we modified the WebAnywhere to serve multiple language contents written in both English and Korean texts. The modified WebAnywhere system is called kWebAnywhere to differentiate it with the original system. The kWebAnywhere system is modified to support the Korean TTS system, VoiceText$^{TM}$, and to include user interface to control the parameters of the TTS system. Because the VoiceText$^{TM}$ system does not support the Festival API used in the WebAnywhere, we developed the Festival Wrapper to transform the VoiceText$^{TM}$'s private APIs to the Festival APIs in order to communicate with the WebAnywhere engine. We expect that the developed system can help people with severely diminished eye sight and the blind people to access the internet contents easily.

• MALSORI
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• no.43
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• pp.73-88
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• 2002

In this paper, for natural facial synthesis, lip-synch algorithm based on key-frame method using RBF(radial bases function) is presented. For lips synthesizing, we make viseme range parameters from phoneme and its duration information that come out from the text-to-speech(TTS) system. And we extract viseme information from Av DB that coincides in each phoneme. We apply dominance function to reflect coarticulation phenomenon, and apply bilinear interpolation to reduce calculation time. At the next time lip-synch is performed by playing the synthesized images obtained by interpolation between each phonemes and the speech sound of TTS.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.285-292
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• 2002

One of the problems that should be solved in Text-To-Speech (TTS) is discontinuities at unit-joining points. To cope with this problem, a smoothing method using a low-pass filter is employed in this paper, In the proposed soothing method, a filter coefficient that controls the amount of smoothing is determined according to contort information to be synthesized. This method efficiently reduces both discontinuities at unit-joining points and artifacts caused by undesired smoothing. The amount of smoothing is determined with discontinuities around unit-joins points in the current synthesized speech and discontinuities predicted from context. The discontinuity predictor is implemented by CART that has context feature variables. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, a corpus-based concatenative TTS was used as a baseline system. More than 6075 of listeners realized that the quality of the synthesized speech through the proposed smoothing is superior to that of non-smoothing synthesized speech in both naturalness and intelligibility.

• MALSORI
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• no.46
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• pp.51-64
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• 2003

In order to produce high quality synthesized speech, it is very important to get an accurate grapheme-to-phoneme conversion and prosody model from texts using natural language processing. Robust preprocessing for non-Korean characters should also be required. In this paper, we analyzed Korean texts using a morphological analyzer, part-of-speech tagger and syntactic chunker. We present a new grapheme-to-phoneme conversion method for Korean using a hybrid method with a phonetic pattern dictionary and CCV (consonant vowel) LTS (letter to sound) rules, for unlimited vocabulary Korean TTS. We constructed a prosody model using a probabilistic method and decision tree-based method. The probabilistic method atone usually suffers from performance degradation due to inherent data sparseness problems. So we adopted tree-based error correction to overcome these training data limitations.

• The Journal of the Convergence on Culture Technology
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.469-475
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• 2022

To train the model of the deep learning-based single-speaker TTS system, a speech DB of tens of hours and a lot of training time are required. This is an inefficient method in terms of time and cost to train multi-speaker or personalized TTS models. The voice cloning method uses a speaker encoder model to make the TTS model of a new speaker. Through the trained speaker encoder model, a speaker embedding vector representing the timbre of the new speaker is created from the small speech data of the new speaker that is not used for training. In this paper, we propose a multi-speaker TTS system to which voice cloning is applied. The proposed TTS system consists of a speaker encoder, synthesizer and vocoder. The speaker encoder applies the d-vector technique used in the speaker recognition field. The timbre of the new speaker is expressed by adding the d-vector derived from the trained speaker encoder as an input to the synthesizer. It can be seen that the performance of the proposed TTS system is excellent from the experimental results derived by the MOS and timbre similarity listening tests.

• Journal of Digital Contents Society
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• v.4 no.2
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• pp.233-242
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• 2003

A TTS(Text-To-Speech) System is a computer-based system that should be able to read any text aloud. To output a natural voice, we need a general knowledge of language, a lot of time, and effort. Furthermore, the sound pattern of english has a variable pattern, which consists of phonemic and morphological analysis. It is very difficult to maintain consistency of pattern. To handle these problems, we present a system based on phonemic analysis for vowel and consonant. By analyzing phonological variations frequently found in spoken english, we have derived about phonemic contexts that would trigger the multilevel application of the corresponding phonological process, which consists of phonemic and allophonic rules. In conclusion, we have a rule data which consists of phoneme, and a engine which economize in system. The proposed system can use not only communication system, but also utilize office automation and so on.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2001.06c
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• pp.5-8
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• 2001

The computer programs based upon graphic user interface(GUI) became commonplace with the advance of computer technology. Nevertheless, programs for the visually-handicapped have still remained at the level of TTS(text to speech) programs and this prevents many visually-handicapped from enjoying the pleasure and convenience of the information age. This paper is, paying attention to the importance of character recognition in images, about the configuration of the system that converts text in the image selected by a user to the speech by extracting the character part, and carrying out character recognition.

• Journal of the HCI Society of Korea
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.5-12
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• 2016

The number of visually-impaired people using a smartphone is currently increasing with the help Text-to-Speech(TTS). TTS converts text data in a mobile application into sound data, and it only allows sequential search. For this reason, the location of buttons and contents inside an application should be determined carefully. However, little attention has been made on TTS service environment during the development of mobile newspaper application. This makes visually-impaired people difficult to use these applications. Furthermore, a mobile application interface which also reflects the desire of the low vision is necessary. Therefore, this paper presents a mobile newspaper interface which considers the accessibility and the desire of various visually impaired people. To this end, the proposed interface locates buttons with the consideration of TTS service environment and provides search functionality. The proposed interface also enables visually impaired people to use the application smoothly by filtering out the words that are pronounced improperly and providing the proper explanation for every button. Finally, several functionalities such as increasing font size and color reversal are implemented for the low vision. Simulation results show that the proposed interface achieves better performance than other applications in terms of search speed and usability.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.91-103
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• 2007

The purpose of this paper is to develop a model enabling to predict the prosody of Korean text-to-speech synthesis using the CART and SKES algorithms. CART prefers a prediction variable in many instances. Therefore, a partition method by F-Test was applied to CART which had reduced the number of instances by grouping phonemes. Furthermore, the quality of the text-to-speech synthesis was evaluated after applying the SKES algorithm to the same data size. For the evaluation, MOS tests were performed on 30 men and women in their twenties. Results showed that the synthesized speech was improved in a more clear and natural manner by applying the SKES algorithm.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.25-34
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• 2002

One of the most important factor in the performance of Korean text-to-speech system is the prediction of accentual and intonational phrase boundary. The previous method of prediction shows only the 75-85% which is not proper in the practical and commercial system. Therefore, more accurate prediction must be needed in the practical system. In this study, we propose the simple and more accurate method of the prediction of AP, IP.