MITalk‐79: The 1979 MIT text‐to‐speech system

To mark the completion of a ten‐year effort to develop a high performance text‐to‐speech algorithm, we have established a benchmark system called “MITalk.” Components of the computer‐simulated bench mark include: (1) conversion of abbreviations and special text symbols, (2) a lexicon consisting of about 11 000 morphs with pronunciation and parts of speech, (3) morpheme analysis, (4) letter‐to‐sound rules, (5) syntactic analysis, (6) rules for stress assignment, boundary placement and phonological recoding, (7) fundamental frequency and segmental duration prediction, (8) phonetic‐to‐parametric conversion, and (9) digital formant synthesis. The MITalk‐79 system is being extensively documented and its performance is being evaluated. The presentation will summarize aspects of system organization and performance. (A more complete description will be given in a one‐week course to be offered June 25–29, 1979.) The oral presentation will include a five‐minute demonstration of synthetic speech generated from Engli...