Web DVD

The Digital Versatile Disk (DVD) is defined as a digital optical disk storage technology suitable for storing large amounts of data required by multimedia files. It has proven to be the key to multimedia convergence because it is able to handle interactive multimedia programs. It comprises six official formats: DVD-Video, DVD- Audio, DVD- ROM, DVD-R, DVD-RAM and DVD-RW.

The only drawback it currently faces is the difficulty of update it once it has been published. To overcome this, DVD makes use of the Internet to deliver real time updated content. The WebDVD can deliver high bandwidth content to users connected to the Internet using low bandwidth. This also ensures that the DVD titles are never outdated or discarded. The Internet takes the old DVD content, re-purposes it and gives it a new dimension. If a DVD title is web-enabled, there is also the dual benefit of the user communicating with the publisher and the publisher keeping track of the users and updating them with value added content.

Authoring WebDVDs involves solving a major compatibility issue since there does not exist a standard format for these. Hence a WebDVD title can react differently to different computer platforms. The currently available WebDVDs can only boast of compatibility with 89% of DVD players.

Authoring a DVD title involves the following steps:

1. Using provided templates so that a context can be created before video content is provided. You can view a few templates at the website www.aln.org/alnconf99/presentations/convertedfiles/93

2. Capturing video/audio content and encoding it into required formats (example MPEG-2, DolbyDigital audio).

3. Addition of menus created using editors - these menus will then allow users to jump to websites from within the video segments.

4. Proofing the title

5. Writing the title to the DVD-R or the DLT.

Authoring tools available in the market include SonicSound eDVD, which helps connect titles to websites, use menu buttons or timelines within movies, and drive DVD playback from the web.

Examples of WebDVD video title could be a movie where there exists a background or history of characters beyond the story line that you watch, and you can interactively view the history and background of a particular character or choose from a variety of ways the climax is filmed. WebDVD would also allow software updates along with the ability to connect audio and video content to information that is available on the Internet from education, government databases and online encyclopedias.

Pen Computing

Scenario 1: A hospital ward where doctors are busy doing rounds, moving from ward to ward and patient to patient, making notes on some, checking records of others. They have to keep records of each new patient and need to update the databases for the existing ones. They require a computer with wireless connectivity to the database. The computer should be light enough to carry and convenient enough for note taking and viewing patient records. Today's laptops are bulky and it is impossible to enter data while standing or walking due to the input devices.

Scenario 2: A building is under construction and the engineers need to constantly carry a huge amount of data regarding the building with them - the plans, the structural designs, etc., which is considerable amount of paper. Any structural changes proposed has to be recorded and the designs have to be remade. What they need is a lightweight, portable, wireless computer which can be carried on site and changes to the designs can be directly entered (with something like a pencil) into the design software to find out if the changes would be feasible. It is not be possible to handle laptops and notebooks at construction sites and they often do not offer the flexibility of using a pen input.

Scenario 3: A student going to school is a common enough sight in every country, and carrying a load of books is painfully common too. A visit to the library for reference material makes the pile of books even larger. What the student needs is a computer so light that he can carry it around and connect to the database of the school library to access books. Submitting his work would be as simple as connecting his computer to that of the teacher's. The ideal device would be a computer that is as easy to use as a slate and would behave like a never ending notebook.

These scenarios and similar ones bring out the need for a very light slate-like mobile computer. In order to make it lightweight and portable, many new features had to be introduced and others done away with. The traditional input devices like the mouse and keyboard are not only bulky but also pose problems to designers and architects by hindering free thought and expecting them to learn how to use these devices for drawing or writing. A very natural answer would be to use a 'pen on paper' like input device where the onus of understanding and converting human handwriting into computer readable form would be entirely on the computer.

Pen computing is the interaction with a computer using a pen or a finger and a touch sensitive display. As computers and other digital devices like Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs, e. g., the PalmPilot or Apple's Newton) are getting smaller and smaller, the 'traditional' input devices (mouse and keyboard) are no longer appropriate if the computer has to be carried around. In addition, pen computing provides a more natural and flexible interface for many applications, e. g., digital meeting support tools like electronic whiteboards. To provide the ability to recognize pen input, a specific hardware is needed which tracks pen movements on a screen. The input events which are generated by the hardware must be processed by an appropriate software. Here, it is important that the pen is not just a simple replacement for a mouse, which wouldn't yield an ergonomic user interface. A proper pen-based user interface should be provided.

A pen-based user interface provides on the one hand the possibility to enter hand-written text which is recognized or stored as free hand annotations. In addition most pen-based operating systems provide special shortcuts to execute functions (similar to clicking on a menu item) called ``gestures''. Gestures are special symbols which are recognized by the software if they are drawn on the screen. This could be a mirrored ``L'' to start a new paragraph or the letter ``B'' within a circle to set the text writing mode to bold.

Origin

The first computer scientist who wrote down the vision of a computer that could be used effortlessly by untrained users was Alan Kay. In 1968, he envisioned the Dynabook, and created a cardboard model of the same. The 'Dynabook' was a light-weight device on which one could take notes and work interactively with wireless communications. A prototype similar to the Dynabook was presented by Apple in 1987: the Knowledge Navigator, which included the book design of the Dynabook and added speech recognition and intelligent information retrieval agents. The new addition in the family of the Knowledge Navigator, but a more realistic device, was presented in 1992 by ex-Apple boss John Sculley and he called it Newton. Pen computing is now a major part of Apple's personal interactive electronics department (PIE). There are many other people and places in the history of Pen Computing among which the most remarkable are Robert Carr and GO Corp., who developed PenPoint as the first pen-oriented operating system in 1990.

Inside Pen Computing

The recognition of handwritten text is an important requirement for Pen Computing. The technology remains work- in-progress even now since the best efforts are still not perfect. The ideal goal of designing a handwriting recognition method with 100% accuracy is illusionary, because even human beings are not able to recognize every handwritten text. There exist two broad categories of the methods used for this purpose:

Template matching A method for comparing pre-stored patterns of font faces to isolated parts in the image, where the two should match as closely as possible. This approach works only with a limited number of fonts and sizes and is especially susceptible to distortion. This method however has not been successful because the writing styles of different people vary too much; even a single person does not always write in exactly the same style every time.
Feature extraction : This method involves finding features in the image, and the features that are found are classified and assembled together and then compared to feature sets for characters to match. This is further classified as off-line/on-line recognition and bitmapped/vectorized recognition. Usually a combination of both is used.

Hardware requirements

: Building pen computing devices requires start

Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE)

Dynamic Data Exchange is a form of Inter-Process Communication (IPC) supported by the Win32 API. The DDE protocol consists of a set of messages and guidelines used to communicate between applications which share data and use shared memory to exchange data. DDE can be used for one-time data transfers and for ongoing exchanges, in which applications send updates as new data becomes available. Quite commonly, DDE applications may support both client and server capabilities within a single application, though this is not required.

The WIN32 API includes the Dynamic Data Exchange Management Library (DDEML) in the form of a dynamic link library (DLL) which applications running under windows can use to share data. The DDEML provides an API that simplifies the task of incorporating DDE functionality in Win32 based applications.

Rather than posting DDE transactions directly, an application using DDEML calls the provided API functions to manage the DDE conversations.

A DDE conversation is the interaction between a DDE client and a DDE server application.

DDEML also provides facilities for managing the strings and data shared between DDE applications. In lieu of using pointers to shared memory objects, DDE applications create and exchange string handles for string data, and data handles, which identify memory data objects.

Using DDEML, a DDE server can register the service names supported. The registered names are broadcast to other applications on the system and these applications can then use the service names to connect to the server. Further, the DDEML provides compatibility between DDE applications by forcing them to implement DDE protocols in a consistent fashion. Existing applications using the message-based DDE protocol are fully compatible with applications using DDEML. That is, an application using message-based DDE can establish a conversation and carry out transactions with DDEML-based applications without any special provisions or changes in protocol.

However, because the DDEML library greatly simplifies developing and implementing both DDE clients and servers, applications should use DDEML rather than programming or DDE messaging directly. Using the DDEML API requires including the DDEML header in the application source files, linking with the DDEML library, and, of course, ensuring that the DDEML dynamic link library is in the systems search path.

Net DDE (Network Dynamic Data Exchange)

NetDDE is a networked version of the DDE protocol, which serves as a virtual hot-link by providing automatic updates to shared memory areas across a network. NetDDE provides information-exchange capabilities by opening two one-way pipes between the local and remote applications.
A Net DEE link can exchange information at any time. The Net DDE services are not opened automatically but can be established using Control Panel services, from the command prompt or through the Server Manager Utility from the Windows NT Server.

E-Banking

Modern lifestyles and heightened competition in the business world mean that a bank’s clients no longer want to be restricted to standard banking hours or practices. Whether they are private individuals or financial representatives of corporations, people are demanding more options for banking. In response to this demand, banks are recognizing technology as a key differentiating factor in the competitive financial marketplace. Recent advances in technology and security have opened the doors to innovative and convenient banking. As has often been said, the Internet Age is all about customer empowerment.

You can use the same equipment that you're using to read this article to streamline your banking and monthly bills, by switching to E-Banking. E-Banking, or online banking is now offered by hundreds of banks, credit unions, and savings associations. Your current bank may offer online access through the Web, or using software that they provide.

Once your online account is established, you'll be able to check balances in your accounts, transfer funds between accounts, enter payments to be made from your account (instead of writing paper checks), file loan applications and pay bills electronically through bill-paying systems. And your computer will remember who you write checks to, so the next time you pay a bill to that same company, you'll just have to enter the amount and point-and-click to confirm it -- and the bill will be paid!

E-Banking allows you to perform most of your routine banking tasks from the comfort of your home, office or location of your choice 24 hours a day with Internet access. However, I do believe that the Internet, because of its low cost, global reach and versatility raises the stakes for the banks - both in terms of the opportunities it presents as well as the risks. The advantages of E-Banking, and Internet-banking in particular, are quite clear - the ability, for example, to disseminate information widely and instantaneously at low cost but there are also strategic threats. The cheapness and global reach of the Internet opens up the threat of increased competition from new entrants who will no longer need a branch network to operate effectively in any given market. This competition can be launched across national frontiers.

Operational risk, including security risk, is of course one of the more frequently mentioned risks in connection with electronic banking. Security is not a new risk. We are all familiar with the various security issues that banks are facing on a day-to-day basis, e.g., robberies, thefts at ATM machines and frauds. However, banking transactions over the Internet do pose new issues. A major concern about the Internet is its open nature. In relation to banking on the Internet, this translates into increased risk of unauthorized access to, and alteration of, information.

To conclude, I think that E-Banking is the way forward for the banking industry. There is no doubt that technology is now the single biggest strategic issue in banking. E-Banking does bring new challenges and perhaps additional risks for banks, consumers and regulators. But it also brings new opportunities to improve the efficiency of the payment system and the quality of banking service. In particular, bankers like other businessmen are, or should be, urgently reviewing the opportunities provided by the Internet. Although it is tempting to dismiss much of what is said about the Internet as media hype, I do believe that it is true to say that we are living in the "Age of the Internet", and businesses that do not adapt to the opportunities and challenges which this presents, will have a limited future.

E-Shopping

Just as email has to come to dominate our lives in communication with everyone around the globe, e-commerce is fast emerging as a way of transactions between parties doing business nationally and internationally. Let's just take a look about generally how e-shopping works from a layman's point of view. Got it. With a bit of techy stuff-as they say no food-good food-is complete without salt!!! Let's have an overview of general overall understanding.

Customer's point of view (you and me)

An Internet based retail business is similar to the mail order business, where you are required to select the product(s) you are interested in buying and how many of them you will need.

The difference is that instead of mailing the selected product list along with your cheque or credit card number, you type your credit card number and click "buy" with your mouse.

For instance, consider the online bookstore www.anybookstore.com . If you want to buy a book online, all you have to do is surf its website. Check out its various categories regarding the title of the book, the author of a book, search them and finally -bang-you have got your book!!

Once you have found the book, all you have to do is click the "Add to shopping cart" button. Just like a real shopping cart. Then you can search for more books and keep adding it to your shopping cart, and once you are finished with your heavy duty shopping, you can select "Done".

Finally to purchase your order, enter details like your name, address and most importantly your credit card number. Then submit it.

Once this is done, the computer running the website verifies your credit card number on to a credit card verification service following which your order is processed. For security reasons the data transfer between your web browser, the anybookstore.com web server and credit card verification service is "encrypted" to protect all parties against fraud.

Hey don't get scared, new technology has almost eliminated the possibilities of fraudulent activities. So cheer up!! Sit at home and enjoy the power and the pleasure of the Net.

Web site owner's point of view.



As you can see from the above example, in order to set up shop online you need to look at the following issues:

ü Products you want to sell - The consumers you are targeting at with the various types of products to be put up in your site.
ü The logistics of delivering the products-the system of delivering the products- i.e. setting up the proper delivery system with tie ups with courier companies.
ü A suitable name for your online shop- a catchy and a meaningful name for your web site which would have a long-lasting impression on the people.
ü A web server to put up your website-The configurations and the technicalities based on the web server , which would support your website.
ü A credit card verification service- is now responsible for the transfer of money from customer's bank account to your website account for the purchases.
ü An account where the proceeds of sales can be transferred to.-A simple process. Which is to identify the your bank i.e. Citibank, HSBC, Standard chartered etc.

There are two ways of going about putting the lot together. An easy way out is to open your shop within an Internet shopping mall. This is equivalent of renting space and opening a shop in a shopping complex like Cannaught Place in New Delhi. The alternative is to set up your online shop independently.

Technicalities:

Once you have figured out what you plan to sell and whether you plan to sell locally or go international it's time to go on the net. To begin with, you need to have a suitable name for your online venture and a Web server to put it on and also the credit verification service.

On the Internet, computers and Web pages are identified by a set of unique numbers called IP(Internet protocol) number. These numbers prove to be a convenient way for computers on the Internet to identify each other, it is not possible for humans to remember the IP address's of each and every website. This problem is solved by domain naming system (DNS)where a name like www.any_store.com is associated with an IP number.

Thus to access a web site. All a web surfer has to do is enter this name in the Web browser which he may use. In short it can be said that this name is the identity of Shopping mall the company/person is putting up in the Internet.

Money Matters:



After finding a suitable home for your shop on the Net, you need to find a credit card verification service which will also transfer money from the customer's account to the website's account. This is where you start running against a wall called Law.
I n Case of India, As a resident Indian, Indian laws forbid you to open an account abroad~~ Unless you have a business abroad that earns you dollars ~~.

At the same time ,IN the U.S American credit card verification services do not transfer money to accounts in banks outside U.S. In simple words, you cannot have an account to which you can credit the proceeds of your online sales. Temporary until now.
The situation is no better in India . Credit card transactions without a signature is forbidden in the country which has become a sort of a ritual.

The Way Out:

What you could possibly do is find a friend or a relative who is willing to open an account to which the proceeds from your sales can be credited. Or alternatively get into a partnership with your Web hosting company to accept money on your behalf. After collecting money on your behalf, they can then transfer money to you on a weekly / monthly basis. But this also has its slight effects -You will have to offer them commission, besides bearing a loss of some money in inter bank transfer which cannot be avoided.

If you cannot find someone to accept orders online, you should restrict yourself to sell the products within the country as it will solve your credit card issues as you will be able to collect cash on delivery from your customer. Almost all the sites have the facility to pay cash /cheque on delivery.

Now that you have all the pieces of the puzzle together, all that needs to be done is to get them together. If you are Net savvy enough you could build up your Website all by yourself. Or you could pay someone to do it for you. The choice is yours!!



However just setting up your shop online doesn't mean that you are done with it and Web surfers will come flocking to your little store. How would they know?
They cannot unless they know your store exists. And for them to know of your existence you have to promote your store both on and off the Net. Marketing and awareness is the in thing to be done... So get started…….

E-Commerce

Allow everybody in the world the chance to make computer files available to everybody else, and what do you get? You get the Internet. Well, some of us are happy to upload a picture of our cat, or the stunning killer app we wrote....But for others, its a tremendous opportunity to make money. Thus we see amazon.com, selling books, music CDs, and other things, all from a "virtual" store. To every person in the world. Persons of every caste, creed, race, and economic status whatsoever. Well, to all credit-card holders anyway. This is the world of e-commerce.

The tremendous growth of the number of people on the Internet has led to a huge level of participation of business and consumers to handle their commerce electronically. As a result of this new electronic environment, many enterprises-- small and large -- are developing strategies to use these technologies to further their traditional business. In addition, a large number of companies are coming up with innovative business ideas to take advantage of this environment.

E-commerce (electronic commerce or EC, or simply, e-com) is the buying and selling of goods and services on the World Wide Web. Here the parties interact electronically rather than through physical exchanges or direct physical contact. This changes the way different companies look at business. The business can react faster to customer needs and the customer profile itself may change. Further, there is also the possibility of vastly improving the supply-chain management.

Broadly speaking, we can classify e-com into four types, depending on the parties involved in the commerce activities:

business to business

business to consumer

business to administration

consumer to administration

As and when e-commerce really penetrates in the market, different business models are going to emerge. Some of the currently popular e-com businesses are:

E-tailing or the Virtual Storefront and the Virtual Mal

l Market Research

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI)

E-mail, Fax, and Internet Telephony

Business-to-Business Buying and Selling

Finally, before concluding, we note that a major issue in the success of e-commerce is the problem of security. Security issues include authenticating business users, controlling access to resources such as Web pages for selected users, encryption of communications. In general, ensuring the privacy and effectiveness of transactions is one of the most important things for e-com.

Among the most widely-used security technologies are Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Rivest-Shamir-Adleman.

Search Engines

There are billions of web-pages on the world-wide-web, which contain information on every conceivable topic on earth. So how can you find the one piece of information that you are looking for? Well, you go to a "Search Engine", or your favorite "Portal". But how do they keep track of all the information? Well, they use a multitude of ideas to help you find the right piece of information.

A Search Engine is a program which is used to search the desired information on the world wide web. A typical search engine has three parts.

A spider (also called a "crawler" or a "bot") that goes to a web page and reads it's content; and uses the hypertext links on each page to discover and read a site's other pages. Typically spiders will ask for permission from the server containing the site before reading the pages from the site.

A program that creates a huge index (sometimes called a "catalog") from the pages that have been read.

A program that receives your search request, compares it to the entries in the index, and returns results to you.

An alternative to using a Search Engine is to explore a structured directory of topics. Yahoo, which also lets you use its Search Engine, is the most widely-used directory on the Web. A number of Web sites offer both the Search Engine and Directory approaches for finding information. Often these sites are called "portals" because they give the user a good place to "enter" the web.

Web-sites follow different approaches to help you find what you are looking for, For example:

Major Search Engines such as Yahoo, AltaVista, Lycos, and Google index the content of a large portion of the Web and provide results that can run for pages - and consequently overwhelm the user.

Specialized content Search Engines are selective about what part of the Web is crawled and indexed. For example, TechTarget sites for products such as the AS/400 (http://www.search400.com) and Windows NT (http://www.searchnt.com) selectively index only the best sites about these products and provide a shorter but more focused list of results.

Ask Jeeves (http://www.askjeeves.com) provides a general search of the Web but allows you to enter a search request in natural language, such as "What's the temperature in New York now".

Special tools such as WebFerret (from http://www.softferret.com) let you use a number of search engines at the same time and compile results for you in a single list. Ask Jeeves is also a "meta-search engine", since it searches other search engines.

Individual Web sites, especially larger corporate sites, may use a search engine to index and retrieve the content of just their own site. Some of the major search engine companies license or sell their search engines for use on individual sites.

Cookies

Big brother is watching you. He knows every site you visit. Every mouse click you make. Seems like a George Orwell Novel transported to Cyber space, doesn't it? But it might be more true than you ever imagined. Somebody actually might be monitoring your PC through the net, without your knowledge. And some of the common agents used for this espionage are mechanisms like Cookies, ActiveX controls, Javascripts etc.

These Cookies are not the ones you have with your tea.

As per Netscape's definition:

Internet Cookies are a general mechanism which server side connections (such as CGI scripts) can use to both store and retrieve information on the client side of the connection. The addition of a simple, persistent, client-side state significantly extends the capabilities of Web-based client/server applications.

To put it more simply: A cookie is information put on your hard disk by a Web site in order to remember something about you at a later time. It is a mechanism that allows a web site to record your comings and goings, possibly without your knowledge or consent. Typically, a cookie records your preferences when using a particular site.

Initially cookies were not created to spy on or otherwise invade the privacy of Internet users. They were created to make browsing more convenient for users by allowing them to visit pages within a site without having to reintroduce themselves with each mouse click. The simple function of a cookie is that of helping the user navigate a web site with as little obstruction as possible. They can also be used to customize pages for the user based on the browser type. Unfortunately some unscrupulous elements have reversed the original intention and use the cookies to track the users on the web.

But the saving grace is that the Web site cookies contain only information that users volunteer, and they do not have the capability of infiltrating a user's hard drive and sneaking away with personal information. Also the browsers provide you the option to disable the cookies. Thus if you take the proper precautions, cookies won't be all that harmful, and might even help to provide a better surfing experience.

TTS (Text-To-Speech)

Ram is dumb and deaf. This has however not stopped him from holding a meaningful conversation with his colleagues. We are not talking about the wonders of sign language here. Instead we are referring to an application of the Text-to-Speech technology using which Ashraf types in text and his colleagues hear it out. This is not a stray example, the need for TTS has been felt in everyday life too. Some interesting applications are:

Telecommunication services :
It is possible to access textual information over the telephone - this information could be your e-mail being read out to you, which is called Integrated Messaging. Texts might range from simple messages to huge databases which cannot be read and stored as digitized speech, Telephone Relay Service which allows you to have a conversation with hearing impaired persons and Automated CallerName and Address which is a computerized version of reverse directory.

Education :
TTS combined with a computer aided learning system can be used to learn a new language, with correct pronunciations and sentence formations. Students with speech disability, with the help of especially designed keyboards and quick sentence assembling programs, can overcome their handicap completely. Stephen Hawking, a leading Astro-physicist uses this system to give all his lectures. The visually impaired too benefit from TTS systems which are coupled with OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to give them access to written text. TTS is used in talking books which are available on line.

Vocal Monitoring :
Oral information is often more effective than written messages, it is more appealing and allows other visual information at the same time. It is also preferred on factory floors and industries where it is not possible for workers to read information while working. TTS is highly successful in measurement and control systems. They are widely used in security systems too.

Man-Machine communications :
TTS is obviously the link for the ultimate communication between man and machine.

Fundamental and Applied Research : TTS systems are considered the best guinea pigs for linguistic research since repeated experiments produce the same result which is hardly the case with human subjects. This characteristic makes TTS systems very popular with phoneticians.

ORIGIN

Text-to-Speech systems find their roots with Speech synthesis, the research of which dates as far back as 1939, which ironically predates the computer. The device called the 'Voder' created by Dudley in the Bell Laboratories was an analog speech synthesis system. In early 1970s the Text to Speech systems were created as a natural progression of concatenative synthesis by Joseph Olive. However today there exist many more methods for creating Text to Speech systems.

INSIDE TTS

What is TTS?

Very simply, a TTS synthesizer is a computer based system which can read aloud any text dynamically, whether this text is entered by the user or any other system. Putting it differently, it is a system which can read aloud any sentence entered even if it is for the first time for the system. This makes TTS systems fundamentally different from talking machines in the market which basically act as record players. These machines are capable of concatenating isolated recorded words and playing them out loud. These are also called as Voice Response Systems, they have only a limited vocabulary, for example, announcements at railway stations, reservation enquiry systems, etc. When we talk about TTS we are talking of just about anything being read out. This makes it impossible to record all words for a particular language, hence Text to Speech is often defined as 'automatic production of speech, through a grapheme-to-phoneme transcription of the sentences to utter'.

On the face of it, speech synthesis appears to be an achievable task since humans learn to speak at a very early age and the mechanics of learning are very simple like learning how to pronounce vowels and the phonetic descriptions of all alphabets. This is far from truth though. The vocal sounds we produce while speaking are a result of lung pressure, glottis tension, and configuration of the nasal and the vocal tract which never remain the same and keep evolving. All the above factors are in turn controlled by the cortex which uses these factors to transmit the meaning of the sentence.

Today reproducing the same scientifically is possibly conceivable using neural networks, speech synthesis and semantic analysis but such a machine would be highly complex and economically out of reach by the common man. So the current systems do not exhibit any feelings or should we say are lacking in their naturalness as a sacrifice to simplicity and affordability.

A block diagram of TTS synthesizer is displayed below:


When we talk about TTS today, we are referring to Model based TTS systems which try to imitate the human sound production system. It has two main components:
Natural Language Processing or NLP : It is responsible for producing the phonetic form of the text read, or simply how the text would sound coupled with intonations and rhythm together called 'prosody'.

Digital Signal Processing or DSP : DSP has the onus of converting the symbolic information comprising phonemes and the prosody into speech using algorithms and computations.The entire procedure is extremely memory hungry and to reduce the memory expense, some procedures are short circuited. This results in reducing the naturalness of the voice created while making the system more efficient with less memory requirements.

Text-To-Speech Synthesis Approaches

Text-to-speech (TTS) technology has traditionally been classified into two main categories and a third that is a hybrid of the first two:

Concatenated TTS: This approach uses concatenated recordings of human voice from a library or database. The text to be read is analyzed, the recordings pieced together and the sentence created. Earlier systems used complete words and phrases for concatenation, recent systems use smaller basic units like syllables, diaphones etc.

Advantages:

Since this system uses human voices, it sounds more natural and less synthetic or mechanical.

Disadvantages:

The concatenated systems usually have poor quality since concatenation sacrifices rhythm. In order to increase quality, modern systems have used smaller units of sound for concatenation. Which means each diphone (or whatever smallest unit is used) needs to be recorded separately for each intonation to provide naturalness. High quality concatenated systems are very resource hungry and hence not applicable to desktop applications. These are usually used for server side applications only. These systems are not very flexible which means that in order to create a new voice the entire database for the voice needs to be created again.

Model based TTS : This system mimics the human speech production model. The text is read and each of the words are analyzed for their phonetic pronunciation and passed on to algorithms which are responsible for producing the sound. When one refers to TTS , it u