Index:
How a Synthetic Voice is Created
The first step in creating a synthetic voice is recording the inventory of words and phrases. A software package called InvTool will prompt the person being recorded with a specific word or phrase. Guided by the InvTool instructions, the person will say and store the prompted word or phrase. InvTool will give feedback about the quality of the recording and may make suggestions to the person about the volume, pitch, and goodness of pronunciation, and the person can choose to rerecord the recording or save it. Once the person is satisfied, she or he pushes a button to store the speech and InvTool prompts for the next word or phrase. If the person needs to take a break, InvTool will remember which word they were on and, when the person is ready, will resume where the person left off.
Currently, InvTool will prompt for approximately 1650 words and phrases. However, users may choose to add to this list, and can also choose to stop without recording the complete set.
Once the inventory has been recorded, the raw speech files are processed by a program called BCC to create a speech database that is ready for use by our text to speech synthesizer program called ModelTalker.