ISCA Archive - Adaptation of the multivox text-to-speech system to Italian (original) (raw)

Adaptation of the multivox text-to-speech system to Italian

Gabor Olaszy

The MULTIVOX multilingual text-to-speech system was adapted to Italian in 1990-91. The steps and the special features of this adaptation process will be described. In the adaptation the target language (Italian) was developed from the Esperanto version as a source language. Esperanto was chosen to this purpose, because its sound set and the word stress was very close to Italian. Key words: text-to-speech, grapheme-phoneme conversion, acoustic building unit (ABU), phonetic rules.