One-hand control of a speech synthesizer
Harold A. Cheyne, Robert E. Beaudoin, Thomas E. von Wiegand, Kenneth Noble Stevens, Patrick M. Zurek · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2004
The long-term objective of this research is the development of a one-hand-controlled speech synthesizer, to give laryngectomees and other speech-impaired persons a means of producing higher-quality speech with less effort than currently available methods such as an electrolarynx or a text-to-speech system. To demonstrate the feasibility of a one-hand-controlled speech synthesizer, a system was constructed using a hand-held device similar to a pen connected to an articulated arm for measuring six degrees of freedom (three Cartesian and three rotational dimensions) as the user interface to an HLsyn-based speech synthesizer. Through this interface, the user controls parameters for the first three formants, pitch, subglottal pressure, and glottal area. Parameter control was introduced progressively in that order to four participants who underwent training to produce synthesized speech composed of a subset of English phonemes: vowels, semivowels, diphthongs, /h/, and the glottal stop. The complexity of the synthesized speech targets also grew from monosyllabic utterances to short phrases over the training. After training, a separate group of four listeners compared the naturalness and intelligibility of the synthesized speech to the same utterances produced by the participants with a text-to-speech system. [Work supported by NIDCD Grant Number R43 DC006134-01.]