Bliss communication with speech or text output

A multi-language, portable text-to-speech system has been developed at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. The system contains a formant speech synthesizer on a signal processing chip, a powerful microcomputer and a variety of text input equipment. A special attachment is a 500-symbol Bliss Board. Swedish and English Bliss-to-speech programs transform a symbol string to the corresponding well-formed sentence. Bliss symbols and spelled text can be intermixed to produce either a spoken or written message. A lexicon gives the pronunciation, part of speech and other grammatical features for each Bliss symbol on the Bliss Board. This information is used in phrase structure grammar which can be modeled by a simple ATN to delimit noun, verb and prepositional phrases. Once the phrase structure is established, phrases are marked according to a transformational analysis. Referring to these phrase features, pronouns, nouns, verbs and (in Swedish) adjectives are given correct forms and pronunciations.