Voice Synthesis Appliances: A Pragmatic Analysis

Voice synthesis offers many attractive features to the home appliance manufacturer. For example, it can be used to instruct the user on the operation of a comp! ex appliance and tactfully correct mistakes. It makes an appliance more demonstrable on the sales floor and can cut the number of instructional service calls. It gives what might otherwise be perceived as an ordinary product some personality and novelty value. As voice synthesis integrated circuits become more and more ubiquitous and cost effective, they will no doubt find their way into more appliances. Yet voice synthesis appliances pose new design challenges in terms of design strategy, human interface considerations, and cost. An objective comparison of vaeious synthesizers will be presented, using criteria formulated for appliances. Intelligibility, ease of interface, memory requirements, cost, and synthesis algorithm are included in these criteria. Methods of structuring vocabulary syntax to minimize complexity and cost without sacrificing clarity will be examined, as well as other practical aspects of voice synthesis design such as acoustics, memory utilization, and system architecture. The new Litton talking microwave oven prototype will be used as an illustrative example of a voice synthesis appliance. In addition to a review of the present state-of-the-art, speculation will be offered as to the near-term future of speech interactive appliances.