VISUALLY IMPAIRED STUDENTS EDUCATION THROUGH INTELLIGENT TECHNOLOGIES

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 1133-1138
Author(s):  
Lindita Ademi ◽  
Valbon Ademi
Keyword(s):  
Intelligent Systems ◽  
Visually Impaired ◽  
Speech Synthesis ◽  
Speech Sound ◽  
Text To Speech ◽  
Competitive System ◽  
Natural Interfaces ◽  
Systems Research ◽  
Initial Work ◽  
Visually Impaired Students

The problem for developing a TTS (text-to-speech) is a very active field of research. As the Human-Computer Interfaces (HCI) come of age, the need for a more ergonomic and natural interface than the current one (keyboard, mouse, etc.) is being constantly felt. Talking of natural interfaces, what comes to mind, is sound (speech) and sight (vision). These form the basis of many intelligent systems research like robotics. Moreover, speech can also serve as an excellent interface for visually impaired , or people with motor neuron disorders. In this paper we attempt at developing a TTS system for Albanian Language. A lot of commercial systems are available for many foreign languages (mostly English), but there is yet to be a competitive system available for Albanian language. Although the task of building very high quality, unlimited vocabulary text-to-speech (TTS) system is still a difficult one, with many open research questions, we believe the building of reasonable quality voices for many tasks can serve our needs. Here we have worked with standard Albanian, the most commonly spoken. We hope to easily extend the system to other languages, since there are a lot of underlying similarities between languages. Albanian language being highly phonetic, result in simple letter-to-sound rules. We used the standard concatenative synthesis. The main problem faced by us was to make the synthesized speech sound natural. We investigated the reasons for the mechanical sounding speech and developed different synthesis models to overcome some of those problems. Moreover, we implemented some standard and also novel intonation and duration modification algorithms, which can be incorporated into the TTS at a later stage. Our main achievement was reasonably legible speech with an unlimited vocabulary. The following paper presents a brief overview of the main text-to-speech synthesis problem and its subproblems, and the initial work done in building a TTS for Albanian.

scholarly journals Building a natural sounding Text-To-Speech system for the Nepali language: research and development challenges and solutions

Gipan ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 106-116
Author(s):  
Roop Shree Ratna Bajracharya ◽  
Santosh Regmi ◽  
Bal Krishna Bal ◽  
Balaram Prasain
Keyword(s):  
Research And Development ◽  
Visually Impaired ◽  
Speech Synthesis ◽  
Selection Process ◽  
Synthesis Method ◽  
Text To Speech ◽  
Synthesis System ◽  
Unit Selection ◽  
Language Research ◽  
Shed Light

Text-to-Speech (TTS) synthesis has come far from its primitive synthetic monotone voices to more natural and intelligible sounding voices. One of the direct applications of a natural sounding TTS systems is the screen reader applications for the visually impaired and the blind community. The Festival Speech Synthesis System uses a concatenative speech synthesis method together with the unit selection process to generate a natural sounding voice. This work primarily gives an account of the efforts put towards developing a Natural sounding TTS system for Nepali using the Festival system. We also shed light on the issues faced and the solutions derived which can be quite overlapping across other similar under-resourced languages in the region.

scholarly journals Accommodating the Syllabus to Visually Impaired Students in the English Language Classroom

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-92
Author(s):  
Ana-Isabel Martínez-Hernández ◽  
Begoña Bellés-Fortuño
Keyword(s):  
Students With Disabilities ◽  
Visually Impaired ◽  
English Language ◽  
Read Aloud ◽  
Accurate Assessment ◽  
Language Test ◽  
Text To Speech ◽  
Language Classroom ◽  
Visually Impaired Students ◽  
Partially Sighted

The inclusion of students with disabilities in the education system results in content or assessment accommodations to suit the students’ special needs and to ensure they have acquired the objectives listed in the curriculum. In this paper, we aim at proposing different ways to accommodate a university English language test to a partially blind student who used text-to-speech tools (TTS) in order to provide them with accurate assessment. To carry out this research, the student has been monitored throughout the course to see which accommodations fit their1 needs best. All in all, we have observed that read-aloud accommodations lead to a better inclusion of the partially sighted student and better performance.

scholarly journals VOICEXML-APPLICATIONS FOR E-COMMERCE AND E-LEARNING

2014 ◽  
pp. 131-137
Author(s):  
Peter J. A. Reusch ◽  
Bastian Stoll ◽  
Daniel Studnik ◽  
Joerg Swade
Keyword(s):  
Mobile Phones ◽  
User Interfaces ◽  
Visually Impaired ◽  
Speech Synthesis ◽  
Software Systems ◽  
Text To Speech ◽  
Voice User ◽  
E Learning ◽  
Text To Speech Synthesis ◽  
Selection Of

VoiceXML is a language of the W3C to create voice-user interfaces, particularly for the telephone. It uses speech recognition and touchtone (DTMF keypad) for input, and pre-recorded audio and text-to-speech synthesis (TTS) for output. The text-to-speech synthesis feature of advanced VoiceXML tools like WebSphere opens new perspectives for e-commerce and e-learning. We are no longer restricted to pre-recorded audio but can bring any text to the ear of the user – a user that could be visually impaired and needs a voice channel to communicate – or a user who can read but who prefers to listen. VoiceXML-applications have been implemented by the authors to support e-commerce (selection of commodities from catalogues) and user guides for hardware (mobile phones, etc.) and software systems (MS project, etc.). New contributions to e-learning are offered.

Design of English text-to-speech conversion algorithm based on machine learning

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Li Dongmei
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Speech Synthesis ◽  
Feature Recognition ◽  
Learning Algorithm ◽  
Morphological Structure ◽  
English Text ◽  
Text To Speech ◽  
Part Of Speech ◽  
Modern Computer ◽  
Conversion Algorithm

English text-to-speech conversion is the key content of modern computer technology research. Its difficulty is that there are large errors in the conversion process of text-to-speech feature recognition, and it is difficult to apply the English text-to-speech conversion algorithm to the system. In order to improve the efficiency of the English text-to-speech conversion, based on the machine learning algorithm, after the original voice waveform is labeled with the pitch, this article modifies the rhythm through PSOLA, and uses the C4.5 algorithm to train a decision tree for judging pronunciation of polyphones. In order to evaluate the performance of pronunciation discrimination method based on part-of-speech rules and HMM-based prosody hierarchy prediction in speech synthesis systems, this study constructed a system model. In addition, the waveform stitching method and PSOLA are used to synthesize the sound. For words whose main stress cannot be discriminated by morphological structure, label learning can be done by machine learning methods. Finally, this study evaluates and analyzes the performance of the algorithm through control experiments. The results show that the algorithm proposed in this paper has good performance and has a certain practical effect.

Effects of exercise habits on visually impaired students on walking and balance ability

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (5) ◽  
pp. 823-830
Author(s):  
Kye-Rak Choi ◽  
Si-Eun Lee ◽  
Yu-Jin Shim ◽  
Seung-Wook Choi
Keyword(s):  
Visually Impaired ◽  
Exercise Habits ◽  
Balance Ability ◽  
Visually Impaired Students

Integrating Articulatory Information in Deep Learning-Based Text-to-Speech Synthesis

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beiming Cao ◽  
Myungjong Kim ◽  
Jan van Santen ◽  
Ted Mau ◽  
Jun Wang
Keyword(s):  
Deep Learning ◽  
Speech Synthesis ◽  
Text To Speech ◽  
Text To Speech Synthesis

Subset Selection, Adaptation, Gemination and Prosody Prediction for Amharic Text-to-Speech Synthesis

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elshadai Tesfaye Biru ◽  
Yishak Tofik Mohammed ◽  
David Tofu ◽  
Erica Cooper ◽  
Julia Hirschberg
Keyword(s):  
Speech Synthesis ◽  
Subset Selection ◽  
Text To Speech ◽  
Text To Speech Synthesis ◽  
Prosody Prediction
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