German text-to-phoneme software driven any speech synthesizer
Wolfgang Kulas, Jens P. Blauert · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1986
The SYRUB system is a software system that converts any German text into phonemes. In addition to its high-quality conversion on word level, SYRUB automatically generates a German sentence intonation and controls its speech timing to obtain partial isochrony for more naturalness. Its universal synthesizer interface enables it to drive any speech synthesizer, thus allowing for an integration of the phoneme representations of seven European languages. Furthermore, special attention has been paid to the design of the system's user interface. The system distinguishes between trained and untrained users, and, subsequently supplies them with different sets of error and help messages, either acoustically or via screen. We will present the nonlanguage-specific aspects of our system: the user interface, the universal synthesizer interface, and the generation of speech rhythm.