Expression in Speech: Analysis and Synthesis

'... extremely useful as a guide to anyone working on the interface between emotion in speech and speech synthesis. Tatham and Morton offer a far-sighted perspective to this topic and make explicit many issues the developer of synthesis systems might not think about at all. In this sense the book is also a very good example of how the linguist and phonetician can make valuable contributions to speech technology, and that in the end the best results will be obtained if speech technologists and linguists/phoneticians work together.' -Linguist List

All human speech has expression. It is part of the 'humanness' of speech, and is a quality listeners expect to find. Without expression, speech sounds lifeless and artificial. Remove expression, and what's left is the bare bones of the intended message, but none of the feelings which surround the message. The purpose of this book is to present research examining expressive content in speech with a view to simulating expression in computer speech. Human beings communicate expressively with each other in conversation: now in the computer age there is a perceived need for machines to communicate expressively with humans in dialogue.