ISCA Archive Eurospeech 2001
ISCA Archive Eurospeech 2001

Multilingual TTS for computer telephony: the aculab approach

Alex Monaghan, Mahmoud Kassaei, Mark Luckin, Mariscela Amador-Hernandez, Andrew Lowry, Dan Faulkner, Fred Sannier

The requirements of the computer telephony (CT) industry place conflicting demands on text-to-speech (TTS) systems. Multilingual functionality and high quality output at telephone bandwidth requires detailed linguistic and acoustic analysis. At the same time, the need for robustness together with a high channel count and small memory footprint means that systems must be extremely efficient and databases must be kept small. We present a system which provides TTS for six languages, with 100 channels of highly natural output on a single DSP card.