CONSIDERATIONS ON PARCOR SYNTHETIC SPEECH NATURALNESS.

Considerations to improve the speech quality of messages from the PARCOR (partial autocorrelation) audio response unit are described. First, a method to fit a word to a fixed length time-slot is discussed. Speech quality impairment caused by silence inserted between words and caused by a word whose duration is compressed or expanded, is examined. Next, the unpleasant noise in PARCOR-synthetic speech is discussed. The noise is caused by coarse quantization of PARCOR coefficients and is reduced by a little more precise quantization of the first-order PARCOR coefficient.