SPEECH SYNTHESIS APPARATUS AND METHOD FOR SYNTHESIZING A FINITE SET OF SENTENCES AND NUMBERS USING ONE PROGRAM

摘要

An apparatus and method for synthesizing a finite set of sentences and numbers in one of several languages using an application program which is independent of the language being synthesized. The invention includes a system controller which communicates with a sentence and word synthesizer by means of a communication link. The sentence and word synthesizer responds to instructions from the controller by accessing a vocabulary and sentence database which contains all of the language dependent information found in an application program contained in the controller in standard implementations of speech synthesizers. The language dependent information such as grammar rules, etc., is encoded in a language independent format in the database. Therefore, the application program can be written in a form which is independent of the specific language to be synthesized. If it is desired to synthesize a different language, only that portion of the database containing the language specific grammar rules, sentence structure, etc. need be replaced instead of adding new code to the application program. Thus, by instructing the speech synthesizer to access a different database or by changing the memory containing the database a new language can be synthesized. This simplifies the process of synthesizing speech in multiple languages and reduces the development cost for such a device and the complexity of the controller.