HUMAN FACTORS AND SYNTHETIC SPEECH.

Recent advances in linguistics, speech science, psychology, and especially in computers have made unlimited text-to-speech conversion systems a practical reality. However, the use of audio output from a computer poses special problems in ergonomics, most of which have not been dealt with in the literature. In this paper, we review relevant findings in the literature and recent work in our own laboratory. We then provide some guidelines for good human factors in applications that use speech synthesis. These guidelines address both the process of development and suggestions for the end-product. The latter must be considered highly tentative due to the nascent nature of this research area.