SPEECH SYNTHESIS FOR THE NEW PAN-EUROPEAN TRAFFIC MESSAGE CONTROL-SYSTEM RDS-TMC

This paper reports on the speech synthesis module used to present spok en traffic messages through the car radio, as part of the ''Traffic Me ssage Control'' system RDS-TMC. One of the basic ideas of this intende d Pan-European service is its ability to provide traffic information i n the driver's native language, independent of the language used in th e geographical area or used for broadcasting. To accomplish this for a n unlimited set of location names, speech synthesis is a must. To achi eve best speech quality, text-to-speech techniques are combined with p honetic input that has been optimised off-line, resulting in a flexibl e system with almost natural sounding speech output. A prototype has b een developed for German. First TMC radios for German and Germany will be presented at Internationale Funkausstellung by end of August 1997 in Berlin, which also is the start date for a regular TMC broadcasting service. Other countries and languages will follow in 1998. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.