Developement of a Micro-Computer Assisted Instruction System with an Electronic Speech Synthesizer

A microcomputer assisted instruction system has been developed, that consists of a microcomputer, a light pen, and an originally constructed electronic speech synthesizer. The synthesizer is made of a Z80 MPU and 16KB ROM. The synthesis method is essentially a voice-wave-segment edition technique. 83 wave segnents much shorter than phoneme have been picked up from real voice waves, and the linkage algolithm has been newly developed. All Japanese phonemes have been synthesized. Thus the CAI system can response to a pupil with speech, giving hints, reading texts, etc. A CAI system software has also been developed, that enables a teacher who has not enough knowledge of the computer to make CAI materials. It consists of 3 modules; "pen" "flow", and "teach". The "pen" is a program for making CRT picture materials and saving them into the data-base. The "flow" is a program for getting flow of instruction, and the "teach" controlls the actual CAI session, using the picture and control informations prepared by "pen" and the "flow"