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Analysis of Written and Spoken Form of Hungarian Numbers for TTS Applications

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Abstract

Correct reading of numbers is an essential feature of today's text-to-speech systems (TTS). This article discusses the problems of converting numbers into letters for Hungarian speech synthesis. In the first part of the article, numbers as an organic part of the text are analyzed. Different representations of ordinals, cardinals, telephone numbers, and date and time formats are examined. Special characters, such as comma, period, and plus or minus sign, and various suffixes attached to the numbers may modify the written and spoken form of the number. Numerous conjugated forms are introduced, and examples are shown for these cases. Next, the prosody of spoken numbers is analyzed; intonation, word stress, and pause assignment rules are discussed. Last, implementation questions of number-to-letter (NTL) conversion are addressed with respect to application in TTS and number-to-speech systems.

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Olaszi, P. Analysis of Written and Spoken Form of Hungarian Numbers for TTS Applications. International Journal of Speech Technology 3, 177–186 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1026506930945

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1026506930945