ITD Technotes: Speech Synthesis (Information Technology and Disabilities‪)‬

INTRODUCTION Language is probably one of the most important features which distinguishes humans from other animals and speech is the most important medium of language. So people have attempted over the centuries to build machines which imitate the sounds of speech. It is in recent years, with the advent of digital electronic technology, that this goal has come closest to being achieved. It has to be said that as yet no one has really succeeded in synthesizing a voice which is indistinguishable from a human voice--but I would predict that this is not far away. In the meantime, speech synthesizers are now available which produce speech of a quality adequate for many applications. This article presents a brief introduction to the current technology. Anyone interested in further details might wish to consult my book (Edwards, 1991).