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Due to the various techniques used in experimental phonetics and the language inventories, more and more has been learned about the nature of stops of the world's languages. Stop consonants occur in all languages, with voiceless unaspirated stops being the most common. The differences in voice onset time (VOT) have been termed lead vs. short lag, where VOT itself is defined as the timing between the onset of phonation and the release of the occlusion of the vocal tract. For Hungarian, no systematic analysis of the stops has been carried out thus far. This paper aims to investigate the acoustic and perceptual properties of VOTs of the three Hungarian voiceless stops when they appear in isolation (in syllables and in words) but also when they occur in spontaneous speech. The results of the acoustic analysis show a clear difference between careful and spontaneous speech. Bilabials and velars are significantly shorter in fluent speech than in careful speech (18.51 msec and 35.31 msec respectively, as opposed to 24.64 msec and 50.17 msec) while dentals seem to be unchanged (23.3 msec as opposed to 26.59 msec). Therefore, the actual duration of VOT is characteristic of the place of the articulation of stops in spontaneous speech, and VOTs of bilabials and dentals do not differ from each other in careful speech. Vowels following the stops influence them more in careful than in spontaneous speech, which can also be explained by the experimentally confirmed phenomenon of the changing quality of the present-day Hungarian vowels into the neutral vowel. Voice onset time is a specific feature of the Hungarian unaspirated plosive consonants. A further experiment was carried out to define the actual function of the VOTs of the voiceless stops in the Hungarian listeners' perception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the problems encountered during the design and implementation of automatic speech recognition systems for the Hungarian language, proposes practical solutions for treating them, and evaluates their practicality using publicly available databases. The article introduces a rule-based system for modeling the phonological rules inside of words as well as at word boundaries and the notion of stochastic morphological analysis for the treatment of the vocabulary size problem. Finally, the implementation of the proposed methods by the FlexiVoice speech engine is described, and the results of the experimental evaluation on isolated and connected digit recognition, on a 2000-word recognition of Hungarian city names, and on inflected word recognition tasks are summarized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prosody is the change of F0 and intensity in time and the speed of articulation. The presence or absence of the realization of word accent is also examined as an important feature in prosody generation. During verbal communication various prosody forms contribute to the expression of the textual content of the message on the one hand and of the personal intention of the speaker on the other. In many cases in dialogues the same text can be (must be) pronounced with different intentions. Our goal was to find what kind of prosody patterns and rules are characteristic of these utterance types and what the acoustic relationship among them is for Hungarian. In this article the prosody structures of the most important dialogue components are described, and invariant structures are derived and verified by speech synthesis. Rules are also stated as generalized function structures to show the acoustic relationship of the prosody of these expressions to the prosody of statements. Using these rules, it is possible to convert the prosody of a given utterance type to another one by preserving the naturalness of the speech. The rules can be used in text to speech (TTS) conversion to generate spoken dialogues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes an objective speech quality assessment method developed for the Hungarian NMT-450 cellular mobile telephone system. The method is based on a psychoacoustic front end followed by a cognitive modeling component. Special problems of the NMT system, such as handover (HOV), the effects of automatic gain control (AGC), and the intrusion of signaling noise, are addressed in the cognitive module. Correlation between the subjective and objective quality measures is maximized by finding a transformation that linearizes their relationship. A correlation of 0.95 is achieved on an independent test set between the subjective speech quality and the proposed objective quality measure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a critical review on the beginnings and the development of Hungarian speech research from the 1700s up to the modern era. The aim is to highlight the tradition in order to keep a good memory of the useful results of the past and of the Hungarian researchers who achieved them in this scientific field. Farkas Kempelen, the Hungarian nobleman and his work will be introduced first. The paper then deals with the early achievements of experimental investigations, the description of the devices used, and the further developments. Results that are unknown in the phonetic and speech technology literature will be discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The latest Hungarian text-to-speech (TTS) system developed for telephone-based applications is described. The main features are intelligible human-like voice; robust software designed for continuous running; fully automatic conversion of declarative (short and very long) sentences and questions; and real time parallel operation, running on minimum 30 channels. The concept of prosody generation and sound duration processing is introduced. Also, the development environment of Profivox is presented. The market-leader Hungarian mobile service provider applies the TTS system in an automatic e-mail reading application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses several articles about speech technology and the Hungarian language, which appeared in the 2000 issue of the "International Journal of Speech Technology."