Disclaimer: based on a little of web research; I have no particular knowledge of linguistics or speech synthesis.
On Jun 24, 2008, at 03:54, SteveC wrote: > On 23 Jun 2008, at 18:52, Lauri Hahne wrote: > >> I think some standard form should be used if we ever want to do >> something like this. Although IPA is the official standard, it isn't >> very computer or user friendly. Therefore I think something like >> SAMPA, MRPA or X-SAMPA should be used. These are used to some extend >> among linguistics and are all based on ASCII. These would also >> relieve >> the pain of trying to figure out what something would be in phonetic >> pseudo-english. > > can you summarise these with examples? supercalifragilisticexpialidocious IPA: /ˌsuːpɚˌkælɪˌfrædʒəlˌɪstɪkˌɛkspiːˌælɪ ˈdoʊʃəs/ CXS: /"su:[EMAIL PROTECTED]"k&lI"fr&[EMAIL PROTECTED]"IstIk"Ekspi:"&lI'[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ CXS is basically X-SAMPA, which is basically an ASCII-encoding of IPA. Since we do unicode, I'd think we should rather go with IPA. See http://www.theiling.de/ipa/ for an online converter. I didn't find any speech synthesis package that does IPA directly, though. Festival's "Sable" markup language http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/manual/festival_10.html#SEC33 provides for IPA, though festival doesn't implement this. It does allow e.g. <PRON SUB="toe maa toe">tomato</PRON>. A possible alternative is the free-as-in-beer mbrola http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/mbrola/ . It's a speech synthesis backend based on diphones (two halves of phones). Its input format appears to be SAMPA plus additional data. There's still some language dependency in there, though. Espeak http://espeak.sourceforge.net/ can target mbrola, perhaps IPA could be added as a language? Cheers Robert _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
