Biographical Information

Articles by Caroline Henton

TTS and Personalities: Expressing True Attitude

In order for expressive TTS to be effective, the voice, script, and affective tone all must support the intent and match the customer.

Speaking of the Internet – Speech Equals Access for All

When the U.S. Congress re-wrote the Americans with Disabilities Act to ensure equal accessibility to technology by those who are visually or physically impaired, the legislation (known as Section 508 - see sidebar) potentially benefited many more people than those with disabilities. Boiled down, Section 508 states that it's illegal for a service provider to discriminate against a disabled person by refusing to provide any service which it provides to members of the public. Personal…

Speech in the Healthcare Industry

Because of linguistic dangers, speech solutions that are effective in some areas of healthcare can have lethal consequences in others. Applied to the right solutions, however, speech is an effective tool for medical care providers. Dr. Caroline Henton analyzes the benefits of speech in healthcare and how the dangers are being overcome.

The Name Game

The growth in applications for Text-to-Speech (TTS) in voice automated directory assistance and information and spoken directions in vehicles is challenging developers to produce solutions that deliver accurate and unambiguous responses. Dr. Caroline Henton breaks down the “pronunciation puzzles” in TTS and offers five steps for achieving working solutions.

Taking a Look at TTS

What are the current trends in TTS? Some indications appeared during a novel session at SpeechTEK 2002. The author moderated a Show and Tell: TTS Solutions panel in which ten international TTS vendors accepted an invitation to participate.

Whom Should I Say Is Calling?

It’s a simple enough idea: voice user interfaces (VUIs) should use ordinarry language, as it is spoken today. They shouldn’t be using it in some “corrected” form to satisfy the nostalgic longings of pedants for some imagined purer form of English.

Making TTS Real

Text-to-speech (TTS) technology is a computer system's ability to translate text into synthesized speech. Today's deployment of TTS can be divided into three segments: enterprise and telecommunications; automotive and mobile; and consumer applications. These segments in turn demand differing sizes of TTS footprint: large footprint is host or server-based, accessed by multiple remote clients, and small footprint is embedded. Large footprint TTS is ideal for high-volume enterprise and telecommunications speech services, while small footprint suits applications such as automotive, PDAs, cell phones and other devices. These deployments are reviewed here in order of both market and footprint size. Some compelling current integrated TTS systems are also described.

You Say Zee, I Say Zed

George Bernard Shaw spoke about England and America as "...two countries divided by a common language". If Shaw had been speaking technologically, he would have been showing the seeds of localization. The need to ‘localize’ a software product has been understood for several decades.

Listen Up: How Natural-sounding Speech Engines are Changing the Industry

After a 15-year adolescence, text-to-speech technology is coming of age. Every TTS vendor's goal - a truly natural-sounding, voice-activated computer interface that can read text aloud like a human being - is now within reach of the development community. Industry observers all along have said TTS would have to make a quantum leap before it could achieve anything near the natural-sounding speech necessary for broad market acceptance. Today's synthesizers make that leap possible by using new processing and linguistic models to convert computer text into speech that is nearly indistinguishable from actual recorded human speech. TTS is speaking and the market is finally taking note.

Learnout & Hauspie, Developers Show New Offerings at Technology Day

Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products opened its Technology Days showcase to industry analysts and media recently at a two-day forum addressing the future of speech technology and demonstrating cutting-edge speech-enabled applications.

Industry reports: are they your best information source?

Staying ahead of the pack in the rapidly emerging speech recognitionindustry requires up to date, reliable information.