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SmartKom - towards an intuitive multimodal human-machine interaction
The SmartKom project aims
at developing a human-machine interface that is intuitive to use, self-explaining,
and adapting to the user's needs and preferences. The system will recognize
speech, gesture and mimic input, and it will generate text, graphics and
speech output. The user and the system are intended to use whichever modality
is most appropriate for the particular task, the type of information, user
preferences, and the application scenario. There are three such scenarios:
a home/office working environment, public access to the internet and to
information services, and a mobile device (basically a far-advanced cell
phone). The project is funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research
(BMBF) for the period of September 1999 through August 2003.
Speech synthesis in SmartKom
The goal of the speech synthesis project within the SmartKom consortium
is to develop a speech synthesis module that is capable of producing natural
sounding German speech. This general goal is achieved when the user of
the SmartKom system is satisfied with the system?s voice. This includes
intelligible speech and a friendly voice, but also the appropriateness
of the system response for a given task and within a certain dialogue state.
The speech output component to be developed has to be in accordance with
other modes of the multimodal interaction possibly used in parallel to
speech. The goal, therefore, includes the successful integration of the
module within the SmartKom system. An additional goal of this project
is to invent and explore innovative methods within the framework of speech
synthesis in order to contribute to the research carried out in this field.
Objectives
A. Natural speech.
B. Friendly voice.
C. Adequacy.
D. Innovative methods.
E. System integration.
General Approach and Contractual Aspects
As the technical task is to develop a speech output module for a multimodal
system, all sub-tasks of a text-to-speech (TTS) system and of a concept-to-speech
(CTS) system have to be taken care of. For the following items detailed
work will be carried out within the project.
A. Selecting a friendly voice
B. Create a new diphone voice
C. Construction of the speech synthesis database
D. Development and integration of natural
speech synthesis methods
E. Development of a prosody module for multimodal
speech synthesis
F. Definition of the Interfaces between SmartKom
modules
G. Evaluation of speech synthesis
H. System integration
Further issues
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