Thesis (M.Sc.) - Cairo University - Faculty of Computers and Information - Department of Information Technology

Emotion is an important factor in communication. A simple text dictation does not reveal any emo- tion; it does not covey adequately the semantics of the text. Speech signals are considered the best carrier for emotional information. The transmission of emotions in speech communication is a topic that has recently received considerable attention. An emotion speech synthesizer could help in solv- ing such a communication problem. Speech emotional synthesizers can be used by disabled people for communication, by actors for emotion speech consistency as well as for interactive TV, for con- structing virtual teachers, in the study of human brain malfunctions, and the advanced design of speech coders. Speech synthesis is a by now stable technology that enables computers to talk. While existing synthesis techniques produce speech that is intelligible, few people would claim that listening to computer speech is natural or expressive. Therefore, in the last years, research in speech synthesis has been strongly focused on producing speech that sounds more natural or human-like, mainly with the aim of emulate the human behavior in man-machine communication interfaces. Meanwhile, the emotions and their role in human-to-human, human-to-machine (and vice versa) communication has become an interesting research topic. Recently, new expressive/emotive human-machine interfaces are being studied that try to simulate the human behavior while reproducing man-machine dialogues, and various attempts to incorporate the expression of emotions into synthetic speech have been made

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