Estimation of three-dimensional shape of articulatory organs. Toward the realization of mechanical speech synthesizer

A means of speech synthesis using a mechanical speech synthesizer (MSS) are suggested. The means of speech synthesis with MSS seems to be suitable for humanoid robots, since it synthesizes speech in much the same way as human being. For the first step toward the realization of MSS, a resonator which has models of most of the articulatory organs is developed in real scale and the three-dimensional shapes of tongue, cheeks and lips during pronouncing of five steady Japanese vowels are estimated with the resonator