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A mandarin text‐to‐speech technique implemented on a PIC‐based microcontroller platform

2016; Wiley; Volume: 11; Issue: S2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1002/tee.22327

1931-4981

Cheng‐Yu Yeh, Chih‐Hsuan Chang,

Speech and dialogue systems

In this paper, a Mandarin text‐to‐speech (TTS) technique is employed to achieve the implementation of a voiced E‐book on the PIC‐based embedded platform. A transformation from the text of E‐book to the corresponding speech can help blind users and make the reading more effortless and relaxed. Both the microcontroller with a PIC32 Ethernet Starter Kit (80 MHz, 32‐bit, 128 kB SRAM, 512 kB Flash) and the Multimedia Expansion Board designed by Microchip Technology Inc. are adopted as the embedded platform. Four subsystems, namely text analysis, a recurrent neural network‐based prosodic generator, a synthesis unit generator with 411 Chinese syllabic waveforms, and a pitch‐synchronous overlap‐add‐based speech synthesizer, are made in the Mandarin TTS system and are implemented with C programming language. Experimental results find that a system requirement of 1.66 MB storage memory and less than 25.4 kB runtime memory, as well as 21.3% CPU runtime, is sufficient for real‐time operation such that a natural and fluent speech with a 16‐bit PCM at 8 kHz sampling rate is provided. The performance of the PIC‐based Mandarin TTS system is demonstrated to be good. © 2016 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.