A mandarin text-to-speech technique implemented on a PIC-based microcontroller platform

In this paper, a Mandarin text-to-speech (TTS) technique is employed to achieve the implementation of a voiced E-book on the PIC-based embedded platform. A transformation from the text of E-book to the corresponding speech can help blind users and make the reading more effortless and relaxed. Both the microcontroller with a PIC32 Ethernet Starter Kit (80 MHz, 32-bit, 128 kB SRAM, 512 kB Flash) and the Multimedia Expansion Board designed by Microchip Technology Inc. are adopted as the embedded platform. Four subsystems, namely text analysis, a recurrent neural network-based prosodic generator, a synthesis unit generator with 411 Chinese syllabic waveforms, and a pitch-synchronous overlap-add-based speech synthesizer, are made in the Mandarin TTS system and are implemented with C programming language. Experimental results find that a system requirement of 1.66 MB storage memory and less than 25.4 kB runtime memory, as well as 21.3% CPU runtime, is sufficient for real-time operation such that a natural and fluent speech with a 16-bit PCM at 8 kHz sampling rate is provided. The performance of the PIC-based Mandarin TTS system is demonstrated to be good. (c) 2016 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.