Synthetic Voices

Synthetic Voices
Author: Mark Borthwick
Publisher: Synergy Press
Total Pages: 207
Release: 1998
Genre: Photography of the nude
ISBN: 9784915877636

Synthetic Voices is a ground-breaking collection from the renowned alternative photographer Mark Borthwick -- whose work represents a cross-pollination between contemporary fashion, design, art, advertising, and pop culture styles. The book, which began as a diary, was later edited and re-configured by the artist to achieve the look of assemblage. Snapshots are juxtaposed with drawings and writings in a scrapbook style, the images spilling into one another, recombining in intriguing ways. Borthwick has been one of the key figures in opening up fashion photography to new influences, and his work here is given enough space to freely develop.

Text-to-Speech Synthesis

Text-to-Speech Synthesis
Author: Paul Taylor
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 626
Release: 2009-02-19
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0521899273

Text-to-Speech Synthesis provides a complete, end-to-end account of the process of generating speech by computer. Giving an in-depth explanation of all aspects of current speech synthesis technology, it assumes no specialised prior knowledge. Introductory chapters on linguistics, phonetics, signal processing and speech signals lay the foundation, with subsequent material explaining how this knowledge is put to use in building practical systems that generate speech. Including coverage of the very latest techniques such as unit selection, hidden Markov model synthesis, and statistical text analysis, explanations of the more traditional techniques such as format synthesis and synthesis by rule are also provided. Weaving together the various strands of this multidisciplinary field, the book is designed for graduate students in electrical engineering, computer science, and linguistics. It is also an ideal reference for practitioners in the fields of human communication interaction and telephony.

Voice Attractiveness

Voice Attractiveness
Author: Benjamin Weiss
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 333
Release: 2020-10-10
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9811566275

This book addresses various aspects of acoustic–phonetic analysis, including voice quality and fundamental frequency, and the effects of speech fluency and non-native accents, by examining read speech, public speech, and conversations. Voice is a sexually dimorphic trait that can convey important biological and social information about the speaker, and empirical findings suggest that voice characteristics and preferences play an important role in both intra- and intersexual selection, such as competition and mating, and social evaluation. Discussing evaluation criteria like physical attractiveness, pleasantness, likability, and even persuasiveness and charisma, the book bridges the gap between social and biological views on voice attractiveness. It presents conceptual, methodological and empirical work applying methods such as passive listening tests, psychoacoustic rating experiments, and crowd-sourced and interactive scenarios and highlights the diversity not only of the methods used when studying voice attractiveness, but also of the domains investigated, such as politicians’ speech, experimental speed dating, speech synthesis, vocal pathology, and voice preferences in human interactions as well as in human–computer and human–robot interactions. By doing so, it identifies widespread and complementary approaches and establishes common ground for further research.

Progress in Speech Synthesis

Progress in Speech Synthesis
Author: Jan P.H. van Santen
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 591
Release: 2013-06-29
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 1461218942

For a machine to convert text into sounds that humans can understand as speech requires an enormous range of components, from abstract analysis of discourse structure to synthesis and modulation of the acoustic output. Work in the field is thus inherently interdisciplinary, involving linguistics, computer science, acoustics, and psychology. This collection of articles by leading researchers in each of the fields involved in text-to-speech synthesis provides a picture of recent work in laboratories throughout the world and of the problems and challenges that remain. By providing samples of synthesized speech as well as video demonstrations for several of the synthesizers discussed, the book will also allow the reader to judge what all the work adds up to -- that is, how good is the synthetic speech we can now produce? Topics covered include: Signal processing and source modeling Linguistic analysis Articulatory synthesis and visual speech Concatenative synthesis and automated segmentation Prosodic analysis of natural speech Synthesis of prosody Evaluation and perception Systems and applications.

Quality of Synthetic Speech

Quality of Synthetic Speech
Author: Florian Hinterleitner
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 170
Release: 2017-04-07
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 9811037345

This book reviews research towards perceptual quality dimensions of synthetic speech, compares these findings with the state of the art, and derives a set of five universal perceptual quality dimensions for TTS signals. They are: (i) naturalness of voice, (ii) prosodic quality, (iii) fluency and intelligibility, (iv) absence of disturbances, and (v) calmness. Moreover, a test protocol for the efficient indentification of those dimensions in a listening test is introduced. Furthermore, several factors influencing these dimensions are examined. In addition, different techniques for the instrumental quality assessment of TTS signals are introduced, reviewed and tested. Finally, the requirements for the integration of an instrumental quality measure into a concatenative TTS system are examined.

Giving Voice

Giving Voice
Author: Meryl Alper
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2017-01-20
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 0262337355

How communication technologies meant to empower people with speech disorders—to give voice to the voiceless—are still subject to disempowering structural inequalities. Mobile technologies are often hailed as a way to “give voice to the voiceless.” Behind the praise, though, are beliefs about technology as a gateway to opportunity and voice as a metaphor for agency and self-representation. In Giving Voice, Meryl Alper explores these assumptions by looking closely at one such case—the use of the Apple iPad and mobile app Proloquo2Go, which converts icons and text into synthetic speech, by children with disabilities (including autism and cerebral palsy) and their families. She finds that despite claims to empowerment, the hardware and software are still subject to disempowering structural inequalities. Views of technology as a great equalizer, she illustrates, rarely account for all the ways that culture, law, policy, and even technology itself can reinforce disparity, particularly for those with disabilities. Alper explores, among other things, alternative understandings of voice, the surprising sociotechnical importance of the iPad case, and convergences and divergences in the lives of parents across class. She shows that working-class and low-income parents understand the app and other communication technologies differently from upper- and middle-class parents, and that the institutional ecosystem reflects a bias toward those more privileged. Handing someone a talking tablet computer does not in itself give that person a voice. Alper finds that the ability to mobilize social, economic, and cultural capital shapes the extent to which individuals can not only speak but be heard.

Practical Speech User Interface Design

Practical Speech User Interface Design
Author: James R. Lewis
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2016-04-19
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 1439815852

Although speech is the most natural form of communication between humans, most people find using speech to communicate with machines anything but natural. Drawing from psychology, human-computer interaction, linguistics, and communication theory, Practical Speech User Interface Design provides a comprehensive yet concise survey of practical speech

Text, Speech, and Dialogue

Text, Speech, and Dialogue
Author: Petr Sojka
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 565
Release: 2016-09-02
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 3319455109

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Text, Speech, and Dialogue, TSD 2016, held in Brno, CzechRepublic, in September 2016. The 62 papers presented together with 3 abstracts of invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 127 submissions. They focus on topics such as corpora and language resources; speech recognition; tagging, classification and parsing of text and speech; speech and spoken language generation; semantic processing of text and speech; integrating applications of text and speech processing; automatic dialogue systems; as well as multimodal techniques and modelling.

Designing Human Interface in Speech Technology

Designing Human Interface in Speech Technology
Author: Fang Chen
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 416
Release: 2006
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 9780387241555

Bridging the gap between the needs of the technical engineer and cognitive researchers related to speech technology applications. Systematic approach focusing on the utility of speech related product design Designed to respond to the growing need for specific theories, tools and methods for design, testing and evaluating speech related human-system interfaces. Targeted at designers, engineers, and decision makers working in the area of speech technology research