This book gives a concise treatment of modern speech synthesis: it comprises four parts which conduct from the fundamentals via a state-of-art display to an outlook of modern and future applications. The first introductory part contains a general discussion of the role of speech synthesis in the field of speech technology. In the second part, fundamentals are presented using the classical subdivision of text-to-speech systems into a linguistic and an acoustic part. The algorithms which are used in these parts build the fundament of speech synthesis. The third part presents advanced topics: - Embedded TTS, inventory compression with standard codecs Databases and tools HMM synthesis Adaptive personal features Prosody, models of emotions Multilinguality, special problems with tone languages In the last part the authors describe key applications (automotive, telecommunication, etc.) and describe methods for evaluating the quality of TTS systems.

Fundamentals.- Advanced Topics.- Application and Evaluation.