Synthesis of unlimited speech in Indian languages using formant-based rules

Synthesis of continuous and unlimited speech is a matter of theoretical as well as technological interest. Independent efforts are needed for synthesis in Indian languages which are substantially different from English and other European languages. The paper discusses basic synthesis issues like text-to-phoneme and phoneme-to-speech conversion and incorporation of prosody. The three commonly adopted methodologies of concatenation, formant and articulatory syntheses are compared. The TIFR phoneme-to-speech synthesizer which utilizes a standard formant synthesizer as a speech production model is described and the methodology for evolving and organizing formant-based rules to drive the used synthesizer is emphasized. The results of some perception tests are reported and a few potential applications are suggested. The direction of the future work for enhancing the quality and expanding the scope of the synthesizer is indicated. Deceased