An adaptable speech system for MS-DOS based personal computers

A software system to interface standard personal computer applications to speech synthesis hardware is presented. It has been designed for use with applications utilizing MS-DOS on IBM PCs and compatible computers. A variety of phoneme-driven speech synthesizers may be supported. The system is composed of three main software elements: (1) an interface to the input and output of the standard application by the operating system; (2) a user interface providing control of the system; (3) translation of text to speech. Hardware consists of the host computer system and a simple speech synthesizer. The speech system is adaptable to various speech synthesizer hardware. Adapting the speech system to another synthesizer requires two changes; to the IPA-to-synthesizer translation rule file to reflect that specific synthesizer's phoneme-code representation, and to the software that drives the synthesizer hardware to reflect the manner in which the hardware interfaces to the computer system.<>