Datasheet

B - 1
USER'S GUIDE
Appendix B
SYNTAX RULES
SPEECH SYNTHESIS
I.R.I.S. test sheets are provided with the IRISPen Executive and the IRISPen
Translator to get a better idea of the highly advanced nature of “Read & Speak”.
They allow you to experiment with the text-to-speech capability of your IRISPen
and get aware of the linguistic rules you should respect when you want to cor-
rectly read “normalized” character strings such as telephone numbers, bank ac-
count numbers, date and time indications etc.
To ensure that the speech feature will produce correct results for such char-
acter strings, you should respect these rules when your documents - forms, labels
etc. - are designed and produced. In other words, these syntax rules tell you how
English dates, French telephone numbers and German bank account numbers
should be composed to be recognized as such.
These rules are discussed below per language - it is obvious that such writing
rules differ per country. One general rule is this: insert periods between the let-
ters of a word to have the word read letter-per-letter. "N.A.T.O." for example
yields a different result than "NATO"!
The speech synthesis of the IRISPen Executive is limited to a single language
of your choice, the IRISPen Translator is equipped with the speech libraries of
the two languages in the language pair. You can extend your system effortlessly
by installing text-to-speech modules for additional languages. Ten languages are
currently available: (American) English and British English, Brazilian, Dutch,
French, German, Italian, Mexican, Russian and Spanish.