Synthesized Speech in Spanish: Theory and Application
William H. Klemme · Hispania · 1985
What began as an endeavor to assist the visually-impaired student in vocabulary look-up from English glossaries using a speech synthesizer led to our developing a more powerful system which produces intelligible synthetic speech in Spanish (as well as in German, French or Russian). A relatively inexpensive free-standing English speech synthesizer, adaptable to any computer or terminal with an asynchronous port was used to produce software for intelligible speech in Spanish. The synthesizer used is the Echo GP, and the software was written in Basic. Experimentation was done on the Apple II Plus, the IBM-PC and the VAX. Student work stations are actually GIGI terminals linked to the VAX system. Development of software was found to be quicker on the Apple or IBM computers, as there are no delays in feedback.