Education

"During the initial meetings of the ESCA (now ISCA) speech synthesis SIG (SynSIG) at the ICSLP conference in Sydney 1998 many of us felt that we should devote some of our efforts to improve our teaching activities at universities and other academic institutions. Although everybody has his own way of teaching we can improve our courses by sharing experience and already prepared course material. This web page is devoted to this task." (text by Gregor Möhler)

Organizations involved in teaching speech synthesis

Organization

Teaching staff (in speech synthesis)

ETH Zürich, Switzerland, TIK	Beat Pfister
KTH Stockholm, Sweden, Department of Speech Music and Hearing	Inger Karlsson
Oregon Graduate Institute, USA, CSLU (Speech Synthesis Research Group)	Jan Van Santen, Ricahrd Sproat
University of Bonn, Germany, IKP	Wolfgang Hess
Universtity of Cottbus, Germany, Lehrstuhl Kommunikationstechnik	Klaus Fellbaum
University of Dresden, Germany, IAS	Rüdiger Hoffmann
University of Edinburgh, U.K., CSTR	Paul Taylor
University of Grenoble, France, ICP	Gerard Bailly
Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Unicamp), Brasil, Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem	Plinio Almeida Barbosa
Faculté Polytechnique de Mons, Belgium, TTS research group	Thierry Dutoit
University Paris XI, France, LIMSI	Christophe d'Alessandro
University of Stuttgart, Germany, IMS (Chair of Experimental Phonetics)	Gregor Möhler, Bernd Möbius

Courses in speech synthesis

Introductory courses

• Speech synthesis I.
  • Authors : Gregor Möhler, Bernd Möbius.
  • Language : german.
  • Material : slides provided
• An introductory course on speech processing.
  • Author : Thierry Dutoit.
  • Languages : french and english.
  • Material : slides provided

Specific topics

• Speech Science and Technology.
  • Author : Plínio A. Barbosa, Dr.
  • Language : Portuguese (Brasil).
• Speech synthesis II.
  • Autors : Bernd Möbius, Gregor Möhler.
  • Language : german.
  • Material : slides provided

Tutorials

• 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.

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.