ISCA Archive Eurospeech 1995
ISCA Archive Eurospeech 1995

Speech synthesis for the new pan-european traffic message control system RDS-TMC

Bert Van Coile, Hans-Wilhelm Rühl, L. Vogten, M. Thoone, S. Goß, D. Delaey, E. Moons, Jacques M. B. Terken, Jan Roelof de Pijper, M. Kugler, P. Kaufholz, R. Krüger, S. Leys, S. Willems

This paper reports on the speech synthesis module used within the Pan-European Traffic Message Control system RDS-TMC to present spoken traffic messages through the car radio. A central concern has been to generate spoken traffic messages in a language selected by the user, independent of the geographical area. Another feature is the combination of text-to-speech techniques with phonetic input which has been optimized off-line, resulting in a flexible system with natural sounding speech output. A prototype has been developed for German, and more languages are to follow soon.