1. Olga Pustovalova, State University of Moldova [email_address] Scientific advisor : Gheorghe C ăpăţână, Ph.D.

3. Advantages Auditory learning style Fewer eyestrain Several tasks at a time Accessibility

4. Disadvantages Quality issues Bandwidth issues Non-auditory learning styles? Search, scanning, scrolling?

5. Research topic Voice output Speech synthesis (TTS) Speech synthesis based on a limited-domain dictionary Use cases Architectures

6. Usage of TTS Unlimited dictionary: Lower quality. Texts of any type. Limited dictionary: Higher quality. Texts of specific structure. E.g. Julia Zhang (2004). Language Generation and Speech Synthesis in Dialogues for Language Learning

7. Difficult and exhausting to listen. Strange intonations, incorrect accents and pauses, unnatural way of reading. Most advanced tools not available for free. First impressions Text-to-speech. Unlimited dictionary. Russian TTS: user experience studies. 2008

8. Higher motivation to use TTS. It took several days to get comfortable with synthesized voice. Multi-tasking: listening while doing something else. Computer vs. creating audio-files for music players. Long-term users Text-to-speech. Unlimited dictionary. Russian TTS: user experience studies. 2008

9. Subjective quality Naturalness and intelligibility. Questionnaires. Modified mean opinion score (MOS). Objective quality Viswanathan (2005) Rix, Hollier (1993-2001) Pitch, jitter, harmonic-to-noise ratio.