| With the rapid globalization process, China's foreign exchanges have become increasingly frequent. As a common working language, English has been paid increasing people's attention on. However, our only concern about written English and the lack of English speaking environment led to little achievement in Spoken English teaching in China recently. Although the development of computer technology in China is in full swing, the computer assistance pronuciation learning is still lingering in the initial stage.In view of this situation, we applied the visual speech technology to tutor English pronunciation for the beginners. Referring to the Phonics pedagogy popularized in US, we developed an English Pronunciation tutoring system based on Lips-simultaneous voice. It will help beginners learn English pronunciation at the following two aspects:First, according to the dual-modal characteristics of voice, visual speech will be a great benefit to users not only in observation and imitation simulation, but also in comprehension and recollection.Second, the user interface using Visual Speech technology will be more friendly, and the human-computer interaction will be more harmonious. This natural system will be of great help to ease the pressure and to fire up the enthusiasm of the beginners in their pronunciation learning.This paper will focus on the following aspects:A. Standard, the basic technology about facial object of MPEG-4 is presented.B. Technology support, TTS engine of Microsoft Speech SDK 5.1 is introduced in detail, and some practice and examples will also be discussed.C. Framework of system, the framework of TTVS(Text-To-Visual Speech) system is proposed and described.D. Algorithms, many specific algorithms adopted and optimized for TTVS system are presented and discussed.E. Applications, the knowledges, functions and using scenes of EP Tutor system are described.F. Future work, EP Tutor system is introduced, and future directions of this system are presented. |
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