Re: IPA speech synthesizer

FWIW: My OP was not to say "could you make it sound perfect", but
"could you make it sound good enough for Wikipedia use by general
public on arbitrary IPA-coded pronunciations".

Some of you seem to be arguing that IPA transcriptions do not encode
enough information e.g. about intonation. Others, that the sound
produced, while presumably replicable by a linguistically naïve human
just from an IPA chart, could not be done by a computer because of
serial-position combination effects.

I suspect that this means you're taking a bit more pure an approach to
the question than I meant.

To recast it a bit: how hard would it be to make an IPA synthesizer
that is at least as good as a single-language speaker, linguistically
naïve, sounding out arbitrary IPA transcribed words using
http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/course/chapter1/chapter1.html? It should
be good enough to be recognizable, but it doesn't need to be perfect.

If the IPA transcription doesn't include enough information (e.g.
tone, pitch, stress, etc), then that's the transcriber's fault (not
the synth's).

I just find it strange that a simple algorithm wouldn't be able to do
what a naïve user could, given that both user and algorithm have
access to the individual phoneme sounds.

- Sai