4 ms·

Amusingly the biggest problem here is english itself, and the way it is amazingly irregular in all its pronounciations, and how a few letters can change an enti

Amusingly the biggest problem here is english itself, and the way it is amazingly irregular in all its pronounciations, and how a few letters can change an entire word (constable, unstable). The article shortly mentions the technology that uses voice sample databases, without mentioning its primary example: Vocaloids. With vocaloid technology digital speech synthesis works amazingly well and is used to create entire songs ( here's a video of a voice bank donor singing together with her vocaloid: https://youtu.be/JfW0glLj2pE?t=74 https://youtu.be/JfW0glLj2pE?t=74 ; here's an example of casual TTS for chat that sounds silly, but is incredibly clear to understand: https://youtu.be/R8OoadkjO8Q?t=20 https://youtu.be/R8OoadkjO8Q?t=20 ). However this only works well for japanese (voice bank size: ~100 samples), since it is astonishingly regular (i.e. spelling maps almost 1:1 to pronounciation), while in english there is almost no regularity whatsoever, so to replicate the same, voice banks need to be 1000 samples and more big.

delecti 11y ago
There are still a limited number of sounds in English. Including a dictionary that had phonetic pronunciations seems like it should be sufficient to avoid the constable/unstable problem.
- Mithaldu 11y ago
  It's not just pronounciation of specific words though, it's also combinations of words, and abbrevations like "would've". English basically consists entirely of special cases, while in japanese you can straight-up just match the written letters to the sound and get it right in most cases. In fact, i can tell you the exceptions in this post right quick: Sometimes the u sound is swallowed when it would be more comfortable to say the word without it. "Wo" is almost always pronounced as "o". "Ha" is very often pronounced as "wa" due to a specific grammatic rule. Now try listing all the exceptions to english pronounciation. :)
  - schoen 11y ago
    You can deal with the irregularity of spelling by using a pronouncing dictionary, which has the correct pronunciation of every word in a lexicon. For example, CMU has the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary: http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/cmudict http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/cmudict Spelling irregularities are fully taken account of. But a problem is heteronyms, where the same spelling is pronounced in two different ways depending on the meaning, like English initial stress derivations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial-stress-derived_noun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial-stress-derived_noun A pronouncing dictionary will record each of the options but might not provide a way to determine which one is correct in a particular context. Combinations of words, as you mentioned, do pose problems for speech synthesis because of suprasegmentals, where for natural speech you might need to adjust features of one word because of the presence of others, for a variety of linguistic reasons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosody_%28linguistics%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosody_%28linguistics%29 Japanese has suprasegmental issues too, so you can't expect to make realistic speech synthesis easy just by synthesizing a language with a regular orthography and a simple sound structure. Also, imagine trying to create text-to-speech for Japanese texts written in kanji rather than kana; you'd have irregularity problems in some ways even more challenging than English orthography presents! https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%94%9F#Kanji https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%94%9F#Kanji
    - majewsky 11y ago
      A pronouncing dictionary does not help you when people invent new words or import new words from a different language, in which case readers familiar with the subject at hand might identify the pronounciation from their familiarity with the source language or subject. Unless, of course, you have an AI attached to your TTS that can understand the context in a similar way.
      - delecti 11y ago
        Depending on the context, you could potentially just include the pronunciation of all the new words in the context a video game set in a fictional setting.
  - airesQ 11y ago
    The script/site below is able to transcribe whole English texts into phonetics. It does take word context into account (e.g. "the" becomes "thee" if it is before a word starting with a vowel). Just checked "We've" and it does manage to produce a good phonetics transcription. http://lingorado.com/ipa/ http://lingorado.com/ipa/
- gugagore 11y ago
  If you are talking about phonological categories, then you are almost certainly correct. However, somewhere between choosing to produce certain phonemes and the actual sounds you produce, there's some process (maybe just the physics of your vocal tract) that gives rise to tons of variation in what linguistically is a single phonological category. IPA doesn't capture that. Of course, IPA does capture unstable vs constable.

delecti 11y ago

There are still a limited number of sounds in English. Including a dictionary that had phonetic pronunciations seems like it should be sufficient to avoid the constable/unstable problem.

Mithaldu 11y ago
It's not just pronounciation of specific words though, it's also combinations of words, and abbrevations like "would've". English basically consists entirely of special cases, while in japanese you can straight-up just match the written letters to the sound and get it right in most cases. In fact, i can tell you the exceptions in this post right quick: Sometimes the u sound is swallowed when it would be more comfortable to say the word without it. "Wo" is almost always pronounced as "o". "Ha" is very often pronounced as "wa" due to a specific grammatic rule. Now try listing all the exceptions to english pronounciation. :)
- schoen 11y ago
  You can deal with the irregularity of spelling by using a pronouncing dictionary, which has the correct pronunciation of every word in a lexicon. For example, CMU has the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary: http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/cmudict http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/cmudict Spelling irregularities are fully taken account of. But a problem is heteronyms, where the same spelling is pronounced in two different ways depending on the meaning, like English initial stress derivations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial-stress-derived_noun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial-stress-derived_noun A pronouncing dictionary will record each of the options but might not provide a way to determine which one is correct in a particular context. Combinations of words, as you mentioned, do pose problems for speech synthesis because of suprasegmentals, where for natural speech you might need to adjust features of one word because of the presence of others, for a variety of linguistic reasons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosody_%28linguistics%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosody_%28linguistics%29 Japanese has suprasegmental issues too, so you can't expect to make realistic speech synthesis easy just by synthesizing a language with a regular orthography and a simple sound structure. Also, imagine trying to create text-to-speech for Japanese texts written in kanji rather than kana; you'd have irregularity problems in some ways even more challenging than English orthography presents! https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%94%9F#Kanji https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%94%9F#Kanji
  - majewsky 11y ago
    A pronouncing dictionary does not help you when people invent new words or import new words from a different language, in which case readers familiar with the subject at hand might identify the pronounciation from their familiarity with the source language or subject. Unless, of course, you have an AI attached to your TTS that can understand the context in a similar way.
    - delecti 11y ago
      Depending on the context, you could potentially just include the pronunciation of all the new words in the context a video game set in a fictional setting.
- airesQ 11y ago
  The script/site below is able to transcribe whole English texts into phonetics. It does take word context into account (e.g. "the" becomes "thee" if it is before a word starting with a vowel). Just checked "We've" and it does manage to produce a good phonetics transcription. http://lingorado.com/ipa/ http://lingorado.com/ipa/
gugagore 11y ago
If you are talking about phonological categories, then you are almost certainly correct. However, somewhere between choosing to produce certain phonemes and the actual sounds you produce, there's some process (maybe just the physics of your vocal tract) that gives rise to tons of variation in what linguistically is a single phonological category. IPA doesn't capture that. Of course, IPA does capture unstable vs constable.