Strengths and weaknesses of synthetic voices in the field of assistive technology
Antonio Romano
Synthetic voices are nowadays widespread in much-diversified uses and applications. In fact, the quality of speech synthesis has reached an acceptability that makes artificial voices sometimes indistinguishable from natural ones.
After a brief examination of the main advances in speech synthesis and human-machine interaction, this contribution offers an analysis in terms of costs and benefits of its use in some application environments, such as GPS navigation systems, home automation, text-to-speech systems, audio-books, audio-guides and audio-descriptions.
Keywords
Voice in applications, Speech synthesis, Man-machine interaction, Conversational agents, Audio-description
