The bell labs German text-to-speech system: an overview

Abstract

In this paper we present an overview of the German version of the Bell Labs text-to-speech system, a high-quality concatenative synthesis system with extensive text analysis capabilities. We discuss problems of text analysis, and our solutions to these problems, including: the integration of text normalization tasks into linguistic text analysis; the capability to morphologically analyze compounds and unseen words; name analysis and pronunciation. We briefly describe the prosodic components of the text-to-speech system and their underlying duration and intonation models. Finally, the phonetically motivated structure of the acoustic inventory is presented.