> However, no serious NLP researcher would suggest building a text-to-speech system by getting rid of the middle OCR layer and just hooking the raw image direct

> However, no serious NLP researcher would suggest building a text-to-speech system by getting rid of the middle OCR layer and just hooking the raw image directly to the expected sound. (Well, at least I think so, but I'd be glad to know if I'm wrong.) Perhaps you're thinking mainly of Western writing systems? Presumably since Andrew now works for Baidu, he is particularly interested in reading Chinese. The interesting thing about Chinese is that, as I understand it, the same symbols can have different pronunciations in different dialects, but all pronunciations mean the same thing. I.e. the symbol has a unique meaning, but multiple possible sounds. Which implies the sound isn't really what's important here.