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Article: A bit of drawl, and a byte of baritone.(AT&T Labs - voice synthesis)(Brief Article)
- Article from:
- U.S. News & World Report
- Article date:
- August 13, 2001
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2001 All rights reserved. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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First it was the late Fred Astaire dancing nimbly with a vacuum cleaner, thanks to advances in computer graphics. Soon it may be Humphrey Bogart or even Elvis--their computer-simulated voices seemingly coming to us from the past. And they may even deliver lines they never uttered while alive.
The once droning world of text-to-speech voice synthesis has perked up considerably in the past few years as more powerful microprocessors have added humanizing inflection and character. But until recently these more-convincing synthetic voices, which are based on sound samples from a human source, have taken up to a year to create. AT&T Labs last week demonstrated new ...