Formant Based Speech Synthesis

Speech synthesis has been one of a research area for the last many decades. But, even if there are several techniques of producing synthetic speech, yet it is still challenging to find one that overcomes all the limitations. Although there are challenges, synthetic speech is pertinent in many areas like in teaching and learning process, telecommunication, as aid for handicaps and so on. This book introduces a new method of formant-based speech synthesis for Amharic vowels.In the new model, smaller speech units like phonemes and the like are not stored in the database rather the speech parameters are stored. This helps to produce highly intelligible speech that has the advantage of low memory footprint and only moderate computational requirements than other speech synthesis methods. During run time best parameters that exactly or closely match to the contexts of the input vowel will be passed to the Formant Synthesizer to synthesize vowels. This kind of synthesis method, the first in its kind for Amharic language, will be a benchmark for researchers who work on speech synthesis in general and formant based approach in particular.