[DECtalk] Question About Formant vs Natural Speech

[Brandon Tyson]

Hello,

>From what I thought I remembered reading, I feel like it was talking about synths like Vocalizer as compared to something like Eloquence.

I was hoping I could find a page talking more about the listener fatigue and detail on how a natural voice can contribute to this for some people more so than the formant speech.

I also feel like how well the synth can perform at a high speaking rate was another thing I saw.

Thanks,

Brandon
Sent from my iPhone

> On Jun 19, 2022, at 2:15 AM, Don <Text_to_Speech at gmx.com> wrote:
> 
> On 6/18/2022 9:55 PM, Brandon Tyson wrote:
>> Several years ago I thought I remember reading an article that talked
>> about comparisons between natural text-to-speech voices and formant
>> ones, and their advantages and disadvantages.
> 
> What do you mean by "natural TTS voices"?  Diphone synthesis?
> Limited vocabulary solutions?  Cut-and-paste solutions?
> 
>> If I remember right, I believe it covered aspects like the ability to
>> understand it at high speeds and something else that I thought I read
>> was called listener fatigue or something similar, suggesting that some
>> people can have more difficulty listening to a concatenated voice for
>> a prolonged period of time over a computer generated voice that uses
>> no recordings of human speech.
> 
> AFAICT, all synthetic speech creates listener fatigue.  The question
> is how long it can be tolerated and how much "lost comprehension"
> comes along with that fatigue.
> 
> Cutting-and-pasting words/word fragments/diphones together can give
> more natural SOUNDING speech, depending on the size of the unit database.
> 
> But, just cutting and pasting speech elements together, by itself,
> isn't a panacea.  One problem with such solutions is that you still need
> to impose a "naturalness" contour to the result -- prosody, cadence,
> breath groups, etc.
> 
> And, of course, the input material (the "text") plays a role in just
> how natural the result can be made in terms of listener acceptance.
> E.g., writing with shorter sentences, phrase groups, etc. is easier
> to consume than long, complex sentence structures.
> 
>> I was wondering if there are any articles or pages that anyone knows
>> of that could point me in the right direction by chance?
> 
> What specifically are you looking to learn/conclude from your research?
> 
>> Thank you very much for your time and I look forward to any assistance
>> you are willing to provide.
> 
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