Robotics Reference
In-Depth Information
and
Your birthday is today.
In the first sentence you will notice that the first syllable of “birthday” is
more heavily stressed than it is in the second.
High quality TTS systems are able to impose prosody on their speech
output because they incorporate some of the capabilities of Natural Lan-
guage Processing systems, enabling the TTS system to appear to “un-
derstand” the meaning of a sentence sufficiently well that it knows what
changes in pitch and stress are appropriate for any given text. It was
only in the opening years of the twenty-first century that speech techni-
cians began to master the technology of prosody but now there are some
commercially available systems that sound completely natural. You can
experience one of the current state-of-the-art systems for yourself by vis-
iting
http://www.rhetorical.com/
, where Rhetorical's software is available
for demonstration. With speech of this quality being available already on
PCs, it is clear that the robots of the near future will be able to speak as
well as you and me.
