Comments on the Text to Speech "algorithm"

[Tim Cross]

marc writes:
 > Hello,
 > 
 > I made this remark at the http://rmll.info last summer in Nantes.
 > 
 > I you have Text to Speech (TTS), the "old" way is to invent some 
 > mathematical function and to generate a "sound" which is "close" (in 
 > Hausdorf distance?) to the spoken words.
 > 
 > But these mathematical formulas date from times when computers didn't 
 > have the possibilities to contain about 60.000 MP3s from a human 
 > speaker. If we could organise it that way, the concatanation of the 
 > words would be better than the mathematical contruction.  And if you 
 > learned how to make a higher sound at the end of a question, you should 
 > be able to adapt the mp3 too.
 > 
 > Problem is: we will have to throw away a lot of work by 
 > mathematicians...  Mathematicians never had patents (the Greek would be 
 > rich ;-).  But we throw away a lot of stuff in computer science ...
 > 

I think there is also another perspective to consider.