RE: TTS for Semitic languages

One data point is the claim of 98% accuracy for unvoweled
Hewbrew text to speech (Kolan), as given in:

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

p.s. the melingo website itself claims 97% accuracy.

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


On Fri, 8 Aug 2003 David.Pawson@rnib.org.uk wrote:

>
> > TTS engines are designed to automatically insert vowels
> All semitic tts engines Dave? Not from what we are told by
> a lady from Israel.
>
> The question was intended to find out how good such insertion is,
> if anyone has experience of same.
>
> We've unvalidated information that the success rate is as low as 60%.
>
> regards DaveP
>
>
>
>
>
> > > 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
> > >
> >
>
> -
>
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Received on Friday, 8 August 2003 09:02:23 UTC