Real-time text processing for Italian speech synthesis

The paper describes the software architecture of an Italian text-to-speech synthesis system based on the joining of LPC coded diphones. The automatic voice response system is designed according to multichannel and real time criteria. For each output channel, the following operations are performed: pre-processing of the input string of characters, translation into the proper sequence of diphones, generation of prosodic contours and real-time control of a hardware speech synthesizer.