Introduction to the course
Course outline. A taster of what is to come, by listening to a variety of TTS systems.
History
A brief history of text-to-speech synthesis, to provide some context for the state-of-the art systems that this course will cover.
Key challenges
Taylor identifies the key challenges in text-to-speech. Of these, the generation of natural human-sounding speech is going to be the focus of this course.
Understanding the problem
If we believe Taylor when he says we generally only need shallow processing of the text, then we can state the problem of text-to-speech as simply a matter of deciding what sub-word acoustic units to use, and what contextual features (derived from the text) we need to decorate those with.
Looking ahead
A very quick look at some interesting applications of TTS, to motivate the techniques that we will cover later in the course.
Introduction
An introduction to what this course covers, how it is taught, a brief history lesson, and a survey of current issues in speech synthesis.
