Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference:	GR/L52109/01
Title:	AN INTERGRATED PROSODIC APPROACH TO DEVICE-INDEPENDENT NATURAL-SOUNDINGSPEECH SYNTHESIS
Principal Investigator:	House, Mrs JE
Other Investigators:	Huckvale, Professor MA
Researcher Co-Investigators:
Project Partners:	BT
Department:	Phonetics and Linguistics
Organisation:	UCL
Scheme:	Standard Research (Pre-FEC)
Starts:	01 October 1997	Ends:	31 March 2000	Value (£):	96,017
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:	Human Communication in ICT
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:	No relevance to Underpinning Sectors
Related Grants:
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Summary on Grant Application Form
Current text-to-speech systems, both concatenate and format based, have some common shortcomings: the speech often sounds unnatural because the rhythm, intonation and fine phonetic detail reflecting co-articulatory patterns are poor, so although intelligibility rates may be good, listeners experience increased cognitive load and poorer perception in noise. These shortcomings restrict the applications for which synthetic speech is useful. The collaborative project aims to integrate and extend existing knowledge to produce a new model of computational phonology and phonetic interpretation which will deliver high quality speech synthesis. The model comprises a unified, language- and accent-independent linguistic representation, to be developed initially for Southern British English. The three focal areas of research are intonation, morphological structure and systematic segmental variation. The common factor is a temporal model that systematically structures information from all three areas and governs the output of synthesiser parameters. The model will be tested by interfacing with a concatenative synthesiser, and to a limited extent with a format synthesiser. Evaluation will include perceptual tests for naturalness, intelligibility and communicative success under conditions of high cognitive load. The model could be used for dialogue or single text, and as part of a language-generation machine.
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