Re: IPA Text-to-Speech

Roger Mills wrote:
> Outo Otus wrote:
>
>
>>Hi. I was wondering if there is such a thing as an IPA text-to-speech
>>program, or something similar. What I mean is, a program that when you
>>speak, it transcribes what you said using IPA symbols...,
>
>
> I suspect one needs the human ear to capture all the subtlety and variation
> of the flow of speech........Though evidently speech-recognition programs
> can do an adequate job; how else does the computer on the other end of the
> phone know what we're saying??  Trebor Jung must know something about
> this....?
Yeah... I'd be surprised if a computer could turn sounds into IPA.
Turning sounds into English words is probably a much easier task, it
doesn't need to worry about whether that was [t_j] or [c] or [tS] etc.
etc. etc.

>>and if you write
>>words in the IPA it will speak them to you.
>
>
> This must exist-- speech synthesis programs.  $$$$$$$ no doubt.
...
> Fascinating idea. I'd love to get hold of such a thing. Given a set of
> rules, a set of phonemes, and an IPA sound file, it ought to work.
> Intonation has to be the hardest part.
There's a piece of Free software that does text-to-speech called
Festival <http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/> which I believe
can read (X)SAMPA. You can also set it up to read any language you want.
I've never been too pleased with its quality, though...

> For that you might want a sound-spectrograph program (I believe one exists--
> again, probably $$$$$).  That would show that you were producing things the
> right way (correct formants etc.), rather than sounding "close enough" but
> for the wrong reasons.
You're too pessimistic. Praat <http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/> is Free
software; you can download, distribute, modify, distribute modified
versions etc. It does spectrograms among other things.

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