Through the text and cleaning it up so the computer makes fewer It's about narrowing down the many different ways you could read a piece of text into Pre-processing or normalization, is all about reducing ambiguity: So the initial stage in speech synthesis, which is generally called One thing and usually you have to understand the meaning or make an educated guess to read it correctly. Is ambiguous: the same written information can often mean more than Reading words sounds easy, but if you've ever listened to a young child readingĪ book that was just too hard for them, you'll know it's not as I'll refer to as text to words, words to phonemes, and phonemes to sound. How does it turn the written words into ones you canĪctually hear? There are essentially three stages involved, which Let's say you have a paragraph of written text that you want your computer Of any other person famous for talking with a computerized voice?Īll that may change in future as computer-generated speech becomes Was a truly unique individual-in more ways than one: can you think But hardly any of us talk to our computers (with voice recognition) Switchboards when we phone utility companies, and listen toĬomputerized apologies on railroad stations when our trains are The help of computerized navigators, engage with computerized The 18th century-but computers that routinely speak to their Talking machines are nothing new-somewhat surprisingly, they date back to Played through a loudspeaker the technology is often called Machine reads words to you out loud in a real or simulated voice Synthesis is simply a form of output where a computer or other Input, typically on a screen or printed out on paper). Output (where you get to see how the computer has processed your You typed in or enhancing the colors on a photo you scanned), and The computer responds to your input, say, by adding up some numbers Find out more What is speech synthesis?Ĭomputers do their jobs in three distinct stages called input (where you feed.