What is Speech Synthesis

In this chapter we describe a proposal of a metropolitan information system (MIS) for providing various information for inhabitants of the city, as well as for strangers. The main principle is based on a philosophy of accessing data from the Internet and to provide a user-friendly interface to these data using various types of intelligent kiosks. The stress is put to the multimodal human-computer communications in both directions using image audio/speech and text modes. We propose several versions of the intelligent kiosks and various types of communications with MIS. The first version is placed on public places and offer three-dimensional human head displayed on a large display that gives information about city, institutions, weather, and so on. It is a system with integrated microphone array, camera, and touch screen as an input and two displays and loudspeakers as the output. Speech recognized question for some information will be transformed into an answer using database or Internet and then visually and acoustically displayed to the costumer with help of robust multilingual speech synthesizer and powerful graphical engine. The second flexible version, even if with limited functionality, is the concept of mobile phone used as a multimedia terminal for access to different information. The last possibility is to use a regular phone (fixed or mobile) to access MIS via an intelligent speech communication interface. The type of communications depends on the version of the terminal. The stand terminals suppose to have mainly fixed IP connection to MIS, but wireless access can be used as well. The second version of terminals uses WiFi technology to MIS. The last solution, the general phone, can access the MIS using either fixed telecommunication network or GSM.