Telcordia Technologies
Telcordia Technologies
The original legacy system, ORATOR, serves both SBC and
Verizon in successful reverse-directory services to the
general public. In these services, ORATOR provides all of the
telephone directory information. Customer complaints have been
"notably low" at both installations - in Qwest's case, the same
as when the original service was provided by human operators. A paper
in the Journal of AVIOS describes SBC's service.
The special preparations to correctly convert directory information into
appropriate sentences for synthesis are described in papers by RBOC and
Bellcore authors (now at Telcordia) in the journal Speech Communication.
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Technologies
Contact Telcordia for copies of these and other references.
Name Pronunciation
As shown in the figure below (redrawn from original paper presented at
the AVIOS conference), a Stanford University study compared name
pronunciations from 4 commercial systems, 2 neural net programs and
an analogy learning program to pronunciations from 2 humans, and
found that only ORATOR had name pronunciation accuracy as good as
humans. Confirmation is provided by a Bellcore study presented at
Speech Tech, which found better accuracy for ORATOR than for a
synthesizer generally regarded as one of the best.
Note: 1 out of every 5 people in America have a name
in the Medium to Low categories!
Speech intelligibility
As shown in the figure below (redrawn from the original paper
presented at Eurospeech), RBOC researchers found that names and
addresses were correctly understood more often when spoken by ORATOR
than by other commercial synthesizers (names centered on data
points). Another study (published in the journal Speech Communication) found
segmental intelligibility for ORATOR, using a corpus carefully
constructed to cover nearly all English phonetic contexts, to be
better than a synthesizer generally regarded as one of the best.
The new inventory technique that leads to ORATOR II's clearer, more
natural sounding speech is described in a study presented at
Eurospeech.
Acronym pronunciation and spelling rules
At the AVIOS conference, presentations by Bellcore (now Telcordia)
researchers listed the factors necessary for practical implementations
of speech synthesis, and the approach taken in the ORATOR synthesizer
to address those needs.
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ORATOR is a registered trademark of Telcordia Technologies, Inc.