Education

Teaching material (Slides and tutorial software)

• Speech synthesis I, an introductory course on speech synthesis (in German), by Gregor Möhler, Bernd Möbius, University of Stuttgart.
• Speech synthesis II, (in German), by Bernd Möbius, Gregor Möhler, University of Stuttgart.
• An introductory course on speech processing (in French and English) by Thierry Dutoit, , Faculté Polytechnique de Mons, Belgium.
• Speech Science and Technology (in Portuguese), by Plínio A. Barbosa.
• Speech Synthesis on Wikipedia
• Demonstration of the TTS-System, Selection of the Speech Units, University of Dresden.
• Human Speech Production Based on a Linear Predictive Vocoder, University of Cottbus.
• TTSBOX, A Matlab tutorial toolbox on corpus-based Text-to-Speech synthesis, by Thierry Dutoit, Faculté Polytechnique de Mons, Belgium.
• LPClearn, Real-time interface to an LPC analysis/synthesis system - L.-M. Croisez, T. Dutoit, Faculté Polytechnique de Mons, Belgium (also available build as open source

Historical images

Take a look at our gallery of historical images.

Educational Software

CSLU Toolkit

• The CSLU Toolkit was created to provide the basic framework and tools for people to build, investigate and use interactive language systems. These systems incorporate leading-edge speech recognition, natural language understanding, speech synthesis and facial animation.
• CSLU Toolkit

HMM-Based Speech Synthesis System (HTS)

• The basic core system of HTS, availble from NITECH, was implemented as a modified version of HTK together with SPTK (see below), and is released as HMM-Based Speech Synthesis System (HTS) in a form of patch code to HTK. HTS version 1.1.1 comes with a small run-time synthesis engine (less than 1 MB including acoustic models), which can run without the HTK library. The current version does not include any text analyzer but the Festival Speech Synthesis System can be used as a text analyzer.
• [1]

KPE

• The KPE80 program provides a graphical interface for the implementation of the Klatt 1980 formant synthesiser. The interface allows users to display and edit Klatt parameters using a graphical display which includes the time-amplitude waveform of both the original speech and its synthetic copy, and some signal analysis facilities.
• KPE and many other University College London softwares

MBROLA

• The aim of the MBROLA project, initiated by the TCTS Lab of the Faculté Polytechnique de Mons (Belgium), is to obtain a set of speech synthesizers for as many languages as possible, and provide them free for non-commercial applications. The ultimate goal is to boost academic research on speech synthesis, and particularly on prosody generation, known as one of the biggest challenges taken up by Text-To-Speech synthesizers for the years to come.
• MBROLA

Praat

• A system for doing phonetics by computer. The computer program Praat is a research, publication, and productivity tool for phoneticians. With it, you can analyse, synthesize, and manipulate speech, and create high-quality pictures for your articles and thesis.
• Praat

Speech Signal Processing Toolkit (SPTK)

• The main feature of the Speech Signal Processing Toolkit, available from NITECH, is that not only standard speech analysis and synthesis techniques (e.g., LPC analysis, PARCOR analysis, LSP analysis, PARCOR synthesis filter, LSP synthesis filter, and vector quantization techniques) but also speech analysis and synthesis techniques developed at the research group can easily be used.
• http://kt-lab.ics.nitech.ac.jp/~tokuda/SPTK/

TrackDraw

• TrackDraw is a graphical interface for controlling the parameters of a speech synthesizer.
• TrackDraw

Wavesurfer

• Wavesurfer is a tool for doing speech analysis. The analysis features include formants and pitch extraction and real time spectrograms. The Wavesurfer tool built on top of the Snack speech visualization module, is highly modular and extensible at several levels.
• WaveSurfer

External Links

• See our external references page
• Dennis Klatt's History of Speech Synthesis,
• Examples of Synthesized Speech,
• "The Talking Computer": Text to Speech Synthesis (J.P. Olive in Hal's Legacy, MITPress),
• German-TTS and emotional synthesis ([2] and [3]) demo by Felix Burkhardt.