Mandarin text-to-speech synthesis

This chapter introduces Mandarin Text-To-Speech (MTTS) synthesis. Beginning with a brief review on the development history of MTTS and attributes of MTTS, three main constituents of the technology are presented: 1) Text processing: word segmentation, disambiguation of polyphones, and analysis of rhythm structure; 2) prosodic processing: features of Mandarin prosody, and prosody prediction, and; 3) speech synthesis: parametric synthesis and concatenative synthesis. Finally perspectives and applications for MTTS synthesis are discussed in the final sections.