Abstract
This report deals with the development of a speech synthesizer for a physically very handicapped person. The synthetic method of this apparatus is on the basis of simulation of speech mechanism. By operating 27 keys of alphabetical letters, any Japanese sentence can be synthesized. This apparatus consists of an operating unit and a synthesizing unit ; the former is connected with the latter by means of wireless device and this is portable. A vocal tract simulater is composed on the basis of T-networks, in which an operational amplifier and analog multiplier are used as composing elements. Furthermore, the control parameters of the vocal tract simulater can represent any vocal tract configulation. A simple compensating method is found out to improve the quality factor Q of networks in the vocal tract simulater. As a computer is not used to control the synthesizer, this apparatus is comparatively economic in its construction.
