ACOUSTIC BUILDING UNITS FOR FORMANT SYNTHESIS TEXT-TO-SPEECH CONVERTER SYSTEM FOR MODERN STANDARD ARABIC

Authors

  • G. GORDOS
  • G. OLASZY
  • M. A. SABAH

Abstract

In this paper an inventory of acoustic building units (ABUs) used for the synthesis of Arabic speech is presented. The ABUs are generated for the free programmable PCF-8200 formant synthesizer chip which has been used in the development of the real time text-to-speech multilingual system, the MULTIVOX. To utilize these ABUs for the synthesis of Arabic speech a set of 36 Arabic sounds and all their possible combinations are defined. The inventory of 255 ABUs is designed that each sound combination can be built up by using some of those ABUs. A grapheme-to-phone-code converter is designed so to convert the written input text into its equivalent phone-codes. Furthermore, it contains solutions for the difficult phonetic problems in the Arabic input text.

Keywords:

formant synthesis techniques, speech synthesis by rules, text-to-speech systems, phonetics of Arabic

How to Cite

GORDOS, G., OLASZY, G., SABAH, M. A. “ACOUSTIC BUILDING UNITS FOR FORMANT SYNTHESIS TEXT-TO-SPEECH CONVERTER SYSTEM FOR MODERN STANDARD ARABIC”, Periodica Polytechnica Electrical Engineering, 36(1), pp. 39–52, 1992.

Issue

Vol. 36 No. 1 (1992)

Section

Articles