text-to-speech (adj.)

A term used in PHONETICS and COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS to refer to a system of SPEECH SYNTHESIS which can transform a conventional orthographic representation of LANGUAGE into its spoken equivalent. Such a system begins by carrying out a MORPHOLOGICAL and PHONOLOGICAL analysis of an input text, taking into account such matters as REGULAR v. irregular forms. Letter-to-sound RULES and other special features generate WORD-level phonological representations, which are then transformed into a PHONETIC REPRESENTATION (incorporating features of CONNECTED SPEECH, including sentence PROSODY). Synthesis takes place using a rule-based system, the output being provided by a terminal analog synthesizer.