Designing the next generation of text-to-speech systems

BT laboratories have been developing a sophisticated text to speech system, called Laureate. Laureate has been designed to accommodate multiple speakers, accents and dialects. In addition, care has been taken to ensure that other languages may be accommodated simply within the design. The concept of flexibility also affected the computational requirements of the system. The complete system has been written in ANSI standard `C´ and the principle of platform independence is an intrinsic part of the design. The Laureate TTS system may be ported to any UNIX environment with the minimum of effort. It will also port to other environments with differing degrees of effort, depending on the functionality of the operating system. The paper gives an overview of the system and explains how it has been designed to ensure that different applications can be accommodated with the minimum of re-engineering. It also shows how the same philosophy can be used to ensure that effective development is conducted on the system