DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT OF A SPEECH SYNTHESIS SOFTWARE FOR COLOMBIAN SPANISH APPLIED TO COMMUNICATION THROUGH MOBILE DEVICES

• Published in: Dyna (Medellín, Colombia) Colombia), 2012-06, Vol.79 (173), p.71-80
• Main Authors: HOOVER F RUEDA CH, Correa P, Claudia V, HENRY ARGUELLO FUENTES
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: algorithms; algoritmos; concatenación de difonemas; corpus de voz; diphone concatenation; ENGINEERING, MULTIDISCIPLINARY; español de Colombia; mobile devices; Spanish from Colombia; speech synthesis; síntesis de voz; telefonía móvil; voice corpus
• ISSN: 0012-7353; 2346-2183

In several scenarios of everyday life, there is a need to communicate orally with other people. However, various technological solutions such as mobile phones cannot be used in places such as meetings, classrooms, or conference rooms without disrupting the activities of people around the speaker. This research develops a tool that enables people to establish a conversation in a public place without disrupting the surrounding environment. To this end, a speech synthesizer is implemented on a personal computer connected to a cell phone, which allows one to establish a mobile call without using the human voice. The speech synthesizer uses the diphone concatenation technique and is developed specifically for the Spanish from Colombia. A mathematical description of the synthesizer shows the decomposition of the synthesizer into various mutually independent processes. Several user-acceptance and quality tests of the obtained signal were performed to evaluate the performance of the tool. The results show a high signal to noise ratio of generated signals and a high intelligibility of the tool.