A system that uses short phonetic clusters, speech segments, or synthesis units to synthesize standard Arabic (SA) is described. the clusters are derived from the Arabic syllables. Basic and phonetic variants of the synthesis units are defined after qualitative and quantitative analyses of the language phonetics. A speech database of the synthesis units and their phonetic variations is created and the units are tested to control their segmental quality. A computer-based TTS system is developed using the method. speech is synthesized by waveform concaenation. the intelligibility of synthesized speech is assessed by a standard intelligibility tests method that is adapted to suite the Arabic phonetic characteristics.
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