Machine-to-man communication by speech part II: synthesis of prosodic features of speech by rule

Abstract

For several years, research has gone on in an attempt to develop a reading machine for the blind. Such a machine must be able to scan letters on a normal printed page, then recognize the scanned letters and punctuation, and finally convert the resultant character strings into an encoded form that may be perceived by some nonvisual sensory modality. Within recent years, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an opaque scanner has been developed, and an algorithm for recognizing scanned letters has been devised. The output display can take many forms, but the form that we feel is best suited for acceptably high reading speeds and intelligibility is synthesized speech. Effort has recently been focused on the conversion of orthographic letter strings to synthesized speech.