Abstract
AbstractWe have developed a voice‐on‐demand system in which a voice reading the latest information such as newspapers and public bulletins or regional information is information‐compressed by a voice coding technique and stored on the disks of a PC server, and then distributed to receivers at the homes of visually handicapped persons via ISDN networks. In the compression of read speech, the low‐rate speech coding technique DualSpeech is developed and introduced. The information content is reduced to about 1/18 with almost no degradation of the quality of the read speech, so that it can be distributed at high speed. Moreover, the one‐megabyte memory embedded in the receiver can store about 60 minutes of the read speech compactly and the stored information content can be retrieved instantly by an index retrieval function. With these merits, the time required in distribution and communication charges are reduced, and a voice‐on‐demand service is realized which has the appeal of allowing repeated listening at any time to information which the visually handicapped persons would like to acquire. Evaluation of the performance of this voice‐on‐demand system indicates that the read speech data can be received in a short time, about 1/8 of the regeneration time, and regenerated speech can be obtained with a high quality equal to that of the personal handy‐phone system (PHS). Moreover, we have performed service experiments using the voice‐on‐demand system employing speech compression for about 50 visually handicapped persons. The following desirable features have become clear from the questionnaire results: enrichment of close‐at‐home information which the visually handicapped persons can select by themselves, increase of the update frequency of the information content, and further enhancement of the operability of the receiver. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electron Comm Jpn Pt 2, 85(11): 56–70, 2002; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/ecjb.10095
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