Speech synthesis in the context of "Homograph"

Speech processing is the study of speech signals and the processing methods of signals. The signals are usually processed in a digital representation, so speech processing can be regarded as a special case of digital signal processing, applied to speech signals. Aspects of speech processing includes the acquisition, manipulation, storage, transfer and output of speech signals. Different speech processing tasks include speech recognition, speech synthesis, speaker diarization, speech enhancement, speaker recognition, etc.

In linguistics, speech synthesis, and music, the pitch contour of a sound is a function or curve that tracks the perceived pitch of the sound over time. Pitch contour may include multiple sounds utilizing many pitches, and can relate the frequency function at one point in time to the frequency function at a later point.

It is fundamental to the linguistic concept of tone, where the pitch or change in pitch of a speech unit over time affects the semantic meaning of a sound. It also indicates intonation in pitch accent languages.

Werner Meyer-Eppler (30 April 1913 – 8 July 1960), was a Belgian-born German physicist, experimental acoustician, phoneticist and information theorist.

Meyer-Eppler was born in Antwerp. He studied mathematics, physics, and chemistry, first at the University of Cologne and then in Bonn, from 1936 until 1939, when he received a doctorate in Physics. From 1942 to 1945 he was a scientific assistant at the Physics Institute of the University of Bonn. From the time of his habilitation on 16 September 1942, he was also Lecturer in Experimental Physics. After the end of the war, Meyer-Eppler turned attention increasingly to phonetics and speech synthesis. In 1947 he was recruited by Paul Menzerath to the faculty of the Phonetic Institute of the University of Bonn, where he became Scientific Assistant on 1 April 1949. During this time, Meyer-Eppler published essays on synthetic language production and presented American inventions like the Coder, the Vocoder, the Visible Speech Machine. He contributed to the development of the electrolarynx, which is still used today for the speech-impaired.

Concatenative synthesis is a technique for synthesising sounds by concatenating short samples of recorded sound (called units). The duration of the units is not strictly defined and may vary according to the implementation, roughly in the range of 10 milliseconds up to 1 second. It is used in speech synthesis and music sound synthesis to generate user-specified sequences of sound from a database (often called a corpus) built from recordings of other sequences.

In contrast to granular synthesis, concatenative synthesis is driven by an analysis of the source sound, in order to identify the units thatbest match the specified criterion.

Linear predictive coding (LPC) is a method used mostly in audio signal processing and speech processing for representing the spectral envelope of a digital signal of speech in compressed form, using the information of a linear predictive model.

LPC is the most widely used method in speech coding and speech synthesis. It is a powerful speech analysis technique, and a useful method for encoding good quality speech at a low bit rate.

Multimodal interaction provides the user with multiple modes of interacting with a system. A multimodal interface provides several distinct tools for input and output of data.

Multimodal human-computer interaction involves natural communication with virtual and physical environments. It facilitates free and natural communication between users and automated systems, allowing flexible input (speech, handwriting, gestures) and output (speech synthesis, graphics). Multimodal fusion combines inputs from different modalities, addressing ambiguities.