Re: TTS for Semitic languages

TTS engines are designed to automatically insert vowels to match
how an average human would speak the language, see e.g.

http://flrc.mitre.org/reports/All_Products_LID_TYPE.pl?TYPE=SPEECH

you can also try searching on "diacritizer" in google.

 Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org>  W3C lead for voice and multimodal.
 http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett +44 1225 866240 (or 867351)


On Thu, 7 Aug 2003, Jeff Kusnitz wrote:

>
> I was discussing TTS for Semitic languages with the WAI group the other
> day, and we had some general questions that I was hoping people with
> experience in the area might have be able to offer some input.
>
> The questions center on experiences when rendering text with versus
> without vowels.  A human would most likely not have problems reading
> something written whether or not it contained any vowels (assuming the
> person spoke the language).  How does a TTS engine do though?  Is the
> output reasonable when no vowels are present in the input?  I'm not sure
> how to qualify reasonable - either "the output is understandable", or
> possibly something more quantitative, possibly "60% of the words are
> pronounced correctly".
>
> Thanks,
> Jeff
>