What does TTS pronunciation mean?

TTS is the abbreviation of Text To Speech, that is, "from text to speech". It is an outstanding work that uses linguistics and psychology at the same time. With the support of the built-in chip, it intelligently converts words into natural speech streams through the design of neural networks. TTS technology can convert text files in real time, and the conversion time is calculated in seconds. Under the function of its unique intelligent voice controller, the voice rhythm of text output is smooth, which makes listeners feel natural when listening to information, without the indifference and astringency of machine voice output. TTS speech synthesis technology will soon cover the first and second Chinese characters in the national standard, with English interface, automatic identification of Chinese and English, and support mixed reading of Chinese and English. All the voices are pronounced in real Mandarin, which realizes the rapid speech synthesis of 120- 150 Chinese characters per second, and the reading speed reaches 3-4 Chinese characters per second, allowing users to hear clear and pleasant sound quality and coherent and smooth intonation. Now a few MP3 Walkmans have TTS function.

TTS is a speech synthesis application, which converts files (such as help files or web pages) stored in a computer into natural speech output. TTS can help people with visual impairment to read information on the computer, or it can be simply used to increase the readability of text documents. Today's TTL applications include voice-driven e-mail and voice induction systems. TTS is usually used with speech recognition programs. There are many TTS products now, including Read Please 2000, Proverbe phonetic unit, and TextAloud with Next Up technology. Lucent, Elan, and at & amp； T has its own speech synthesis products.

In addition to TTS software, many manufacturers also provide hardware products, including Quick Link Pen from WizCom Technologies in Israel, which is a pen-like device that can scan and read texts. There is also Road Runner of ostrich software, a handheld device that can read ASCII text; In addition, DecTalk TTS of DEC Company in the United States is an external hardware device that can replace the sound card. It contains an internal software device that can work with the sound card that comes with the personal computer.

[Edit this paragraph ]TTS analysis

TTS text-to-speech conversion is widely used, including e-mail reading and voice prompt of IVR system. At present, IVR system has been widely used in various industries (such as telecommunications, transportation and so on). ).

The key technology of TTS is speech synthesis. The early TTS was generally realized by special chips, such as TMS50C 10/TMS50C57 of Texas Instruments and PH84H36 of Philips, but it was mainly used in household appliances or children's toys.

TTS based on microcomputer application is generally realized by pure software, which mainly includes the following parts:

Text analysis-Linguistic analysis of the input text, lexical, grammatical and semantic analysis sentence by sentence, and determination of the underlying structure of the sentence and the phoneme composition of each word, including sentence breaking, word segmentation, polyphonic word processing, number processing, abbreviation processing, etc.

● Speech synthesis-words or phrases corresponding to the processed text are extracted from the speech synthesis database, and the language description is converted into speech waveforms.

● Prosodic processing-The quality of synthesized speech refers to the quality of speech output by the speech synthesis system, which is generally evaluated subjectively in terms of clarity (or intelligibility), naturalness and coherence. Clarity is the percentage of correct listening to meaningful words; Naturality is used to evaluate whether the quality of synthesized speech is close to human voice and whether the intonation of synthesized words is natural. Coherence is used to evaluate the fluency of synthesized sentences.

To synthesize high-quality speech, the algorithm used is extremely complex, so the requirements for the machine are also very high. The complexity of the algorithm determines the system capacity of microcomputer concurrent multi-channel TTS at present.

Basic framework of TTS in CTI application

In the general CTI application system, there will be IVR (Interactive Voice Response System). IVR system is an important part of call center. Through IVR system, users can input information by pressing buttons with audio, and get pre-recorded digital or synthesized voice information from the system. IVR with TTS function can speed up the service and save the service cost, so that IVR can provide callers with 7*24 hours service.

At present, most common IVR systems are composed of voice cards plugged into the general industrial computer platform, which support Chinese speech synthesis TTS and other technologies.

Typical telephone service processes, including TTS services, can be divided into:

When the user dials in, the system IVR will respond and get the user's key and other information.

IVR applies for relevant data from the database server according to the key information of users.

The database server returns text data to IVR.

IVR sends text information to TTS server through its TCP communication interface.

The TTS server sends the voice data segment synthesized by the user text to the IVR server through the TCP communication interface.

IVR server assembles segmented voice data into independent voice files.

IVR plays corresponding voice files to telephone users.

General public network access (IVR) mostly adopts industrial computer+voice card, and the synthesized voice data is transmitted to IVR through local area network. This structure is only suitable for simple applications.