An optimized TTS system implementation using a Motorola StarCore SC140-based processor

One of the key technologies for spoken language processing is the automatic synthesis of speech. For an important number of current or future applications (including various telecommunication services and voice interfaces for mobile devices), the synthesis of good quality speech starting from unrestricted text and the efficient implementation of the corresponding synthesis systems represent very difficult tasks. The paper presents an optimized implementation of a text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis system for the Romanian language using a Motorola development platform built around a StarCore SC140-based processor. The paper emphasizes the key requirements for such an embedded implementation (especially the intelligibility/footprint combination), the problems that were encountered and the solutions found to these problems.