Emu: an e-mail preprocessor for text-to-speech

E-mail reading is one of the most important commercial applications of text-to-speech synthesis (TTS). Yet e-mail is one of the most difficult types of text to deal with, since it is both highly structured -frequently containing elements such as tables, signatures, "artwork" and quotations from previous messages; and at the same time often lacks any reliable unambiguous indicators for such structure. This paper describes Emu, an e-mail mark-up and rendering program that preprocesses e-mail for TTS. We discuss algorithms for detecting regions of interest in the input text; for "normalizing" the input; and for actually rendering the input through the Bell Labs TTS system.