Speech synthesis systems: disadvantages and limitations

The present speech synthesis systems can be successfully used for a wide range of diverse purposes. However, there are serious and important limitations in using various synthesizers. Many of these problems can be identified and resolved. The aim of this paper is to present the current state of development of speech synthesis systems and to examine their drawbacks and limitations. The paper dis-cusses the current classification, construction and functioning of speech synthesis systems, which gives an insight into synthesizers implemented so far. The analysis of disadvantages and limitations of speech synthesis systems focuses on identification of weak points of these systems, namely: the impact of emotions and prosody, spontaneous speech in terms of naturalness and intelligibility, preprocessing and text analysis, problem of ambiguity, natural sounding, adaptation to the situation, variety of systems, sparsely spoken languages, speech synthesis for older people, and some other minor limitations. Solving these problems stimulates further development of speech synthesis domain.