The background for this project is a wish to automate synchronization of text and speech. The idea is to present speech through speakers synchronized word-for-word with text appearing on a monitor.
The solution decided upon is to use artificial neural networks, ANNs, to convert both text and speech into streams made up of sets of phonetic features and then matching these two streams against each other. Several text-to-feature ANN designs based on the NETtalk system are implemented and evaluated. The extraction of phonetic features from speech and the synchronization itself are not implemented, but some assessments are made regarding their possible performances. The performance of a finished system is not possible to determine, but a NETtalk-based ANN is believed to be suitable for such a system using phonetic features for synchronization.