Sparte: A text-to-speech machine using synthesis by diphones

An operational synthesis system for the French language has been developed at the CNET. Vocal output of any message in the language may be obtained from input typed on a keyboard. This speech synthesis equipment is built in an autonomous cabinet of fairly small dimensions; it can also be used as a single board with a V24-RS232 connection. The device consists of the following items: a keyboard, a display and a built-in loudspeaker, a linear prediction synthesizer, 1200 diphones. The software implemented on a microprocessor includes algorithms for orthographic-phonetic translation and systematic prosody processing; automatic syntactic analysis has been simulated and will soon be implemented. The vocal message is obtained in real time; the synthesized speech is intelligible and fairly natural.