Satoru Furuta

The development of the voice read-out system for digital television receiver

We hope that every people can enjoy the convenient functions of digital broadcasting such as an Electronic Program Guide (EPG). In 2007, Mitsubishi Electric launched the mass-produced LCD television equipped with the EPG voice read-out system to Japanese domestic market. This paper describes the development of the voice read out function of a digital television receiver, background of development, the introduced speech synthesis system and the improvement degrees of every model based on end-users opinions are summarized respectively.

Intelligibility improvement of bandlimited synthesized speech by superposing high frequency component of input signal on baseband signal

We propose a new speech intelligibility improvement method for bandlimited synthesized speech, which is based on superposing high-frequency component on lower frequency signal (i.e., baseband signal), where the high-frequency component is compressed in the frequency direction to be fitted on the superposing zone of the baseband signal. We applied the proposed method to Text to speech and conducted a subjective evaluation of synthesized speech. According to the result, the synthesized speech by the proposed method is preferred to that by a simple high frequency emphasis of baseband.