Intonation: Theory, Models, and Applications Athens, Greece September 18-20, 1997

SAMBA: Prosody in an Airline Announcement Generation System

Martina Delaney, Alex I. C. Monaghan

School of Computer Applications, DCU, Dublin, Ireland

This paper describes a text-to-speech (TTS) application for airline announcements which enables airport staff to specify the type and content of a synthetic announcement. This is a limited domain similar to that for train announcements or other successful restricted-vocabulary systems. Our system demonstrates the possibility of producing natural-sounding prosody automatically for a specified application. Within our chosen domain, we have access to the semantic and pragmatic knowledge which is essential for generating high-quality synthetic prosody. We combine this information with a sophisticated linguistic approach to prosody specification. These two aspects of our system allow it to supersede the unnatural and often unintelligible automatic announcement systems found in many current commercial applications.

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Bibliographic reference.  Delaney, Martina / Monaghan, Alex I. C. (1997): "SAMBA: prosody in an airline announcement generation system", In INT-1997, 79-82.