Voxton, Russon: Systems generating artificial hungarian and russian speech by rule [antikvár]

Acta Linguistica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, Tomus 35 (1-2) pp. 43-49 (1985) VOXTON, RUSSON: SYSTEMS GENERATING ARTIFICIAL HUNGÁRIÁN AND RUSSIAN SPEECH BY RULE K. BOLLA 1. The role of speech synthesis in phonetic research The artificial production of phonetic forms is of great importance fór a thorough knowledge and an exact description of the phonetic strueture of the processof speech. Synthesis is useful nőt only for checking the correctness of the analysis but is an analytical device as well. It is of great help in analyzing the physical and phonetic constituents of the succession of complex acoustic signs realizing language; finding the linguistically relevant (functional) structures made up by such constituents; revealing the regularities of the combinations and arrangements of sounds, those of universal validity and language-specific ones ahke; filtering out concomitant features and compensatory possibilities among the constituents of sound strueture; deseribing how the elements can be varied and combined, etc. 2. The strueture and use of Voxton The physical constituents of the sound substance of speech are organized in two ways in linguistically relevant structures. One results in the segmental and the other in the suprasegmental strueture of speech. We realized this duali-ty of strueture in the course of speech synthesis after we synthesized both structures independently — though they never occur independently of each other in natural speech. A speech synthesizing system generating artificial speech by rule, which I named Voxon, was completed in March 1982. Its sim-plified version is Minivoxon, while Voxton represents a further development. A few months later two eolleagues of mine worked out a system called Univoice which can be used in real time. The strueture and function of Voxton are determined by the needs of our basic linguistic-phonetic research on Hungárián. Accordingly, we had to develop a speech synthesizing system which is effective and easy to use. Voxton eonsists of three main parts: a) a collection of sound sections, i.e. the data base realizing the basic units of the acoustic strueture; Acta Linguistica, Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 35,1985 Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest