Realization of speech synthesis in ASP.net program

Asp.net| programs you may have noticed that speech synthesis is becoming more common today. Electric toys and gadgets from hundreds of mornings are able to speak to their owners in a machine voice. Whether it's a talking baby doll, a talking pedometer or a new automatic phone system, there's a product release that uses text to pronounce almost every day.

Text-to-speech (TTS) technology, also known as speech synthesis, is the process of converting input text into audio voice. This is better than pre-recorded text-it must know ahead of time what to say. With TTS, it is possible to add dynamic information, which can come from a database, or if the user repeats it.

　　 I. TTS experiment

If you have seen or heard of the actual TTS, then you may want to download a free version of Readplease 2003. The product is able to read text from the Windows clipboard. To use it, you simply paste some text into the Readplease editor (see Figure 1)-and assuming your PC speakers are turned on, you'll hear the text play. Currently, the product works only in all versions of Windows desktop OS, but they also plan to release versions for Mac,unix,palm and Windows CE systems.

Readplease interesting is that you can use the Readplease editor to test your TTS parameter selections. For example, you can adjust the pronunciation speed by moving up and down the Speed slider control as shown in Figure 1. You can also change the voice by clicking the arrow button below the small face icon.


Figure 1. Readplease 2003 application: This Windows application may read any text pasted from the Clipboard into the edit field.

What do you need? Visual Studio.NET 2003, Microsoft Voice Application SDK 1.1

Click on the "Tools" menu and choose "Options" to allow you to further experiment with the TTS editor, for example, you can adjust the length of the pause time between the speech engines between paragraphs. Upgrading to the Readplease plus version will allow you to access another pronunciation editor option, which allows you to specify how to read a particular word. Readplease Plus also includes a task bar that you can dock on top of your Windows desktop. So you can quickly drag text from any file-based application to the taskbar and let it read to you.

By default, the Readplease application uses the built-in Microsoft Voice (Mark,mike,sam or Marilyn). However, you can selectively purchase higher-quality at&t Natural voices, such as the voice provided in At&t Natural voices Pack. The starter package includes 8 K versions of "Mike" and "Crystal", both of which sound better than the default Microsoft sound.

Author Note: The term 8K means that the sampling frequency is used to create WAV files that occur at 8,000 bits per second. Another format is 16k, which can produce a clearer and more natural auditory effect. Basically, the higher the sample rate, the better the sound quality.

　　 Second, Microsoft Voice application Development Package SDK 1.1

In 2004, Microsoft released Microsoft Speech Server, and a free SDK allows you to develop web-based voice programs that run on Speech server. You can use the SDK to build a phone or a voice-only application where the computer's interaction with the user is achieved by using a telephone. You can also build multimode applications where the user chooses to use voice or traditional Web controls as input.

The Microsoft TTS engine synthesizes text by splitting words into sounds. Phonemes are the basic unit of human language. They represent a set of "sounds" that make up the sound of words. The TTS engine then analyzes the extracted phonemes and converts them to symbols to generate the digital audio voice.

You can use the downloadable sample application (exploringtexttospeech.csproj) accompanying this article to test the configurable aspects of the Microsoft TTS engine. The Multimode application contains a Web page (see Figure 2) where you can enter some text. Then, you can click on a button to listen to the text in the following way.

Note: Using a TTS engine is unavoidable in situations where the text to be played is not known in advance; however, you can get better quality by recording audio. When audio quality is critical, you can use the Microsoft Voice Application Software Development Kit (SASDK) to record audio. For example, you might want to use recorded audio to prompt the user for information. Recorded audio can be broken down into a series of prompts that are then connected at run time.

· Speak Text normally-provides a test benchmark

· Say as an acronym-text "ASP" was attack "A.S.P."

· Say as Name-mr.john Doe was attack "Mister John Doe"

· Say as date-in this case, the date is formatted as: Month, day, year

· Say as Web address-in this case, the text is formatted as a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI)

· Say as digits-the number entered as text is a series of bits

· The high Pitch/slow rate-text is emitted at a high-pitched slow speed.

· Rate fast/volume loud-text is emitted with a quick treble.

· The low Pitch/volume soft-text is emitted at moderate volume tones.

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