Speech synthesis enhancement in noisy environments

This paper reports recent activities made to improve the intelligibility of synthesized speech in noisy environments. Nowadays Text-To-Speech technologies (TTS) are used in many embedded devices like mobile phones, PDAs, car navigation systems, etc. This means that speech can be produced in different types of environments where background noise can significantly degrade the perception of the synthetic message and consequently its intelligibility. The features discussed in this paper are being developed and assessed inside the EU funded SHARE project whose goal is to develop a multimodal communication system supporting rescue operations and disaster management.