A rule-based text-to-speech system for Portuguese

The latest progress in the development of a text-to-speech system for Portuguese is described. The system comprises four major modules: text normalization, linguistic and phonetic processing, generation of the synthesizer parameters and synthesis. The present rule-based version, based on the Klatt80 formant synthesizer, has achieved promising results, namely in what concerns the performance of stress assignment, phonetic transcription, and prosodic parsing. Each of the major modules is described, and some language-dependent issues are discussed