Patent ID: 6748358
Filing Date: 2004-06-08
Classification: G10L

Abstract:
An electronic speaking document viewer accommodating a semiconductor storage card in the form of a detachable card type storage medium in which text data consisting of letters and intermediate language data indicative of the rules of how to phonetically read said text data is stored, said electronic speaking document viewer comprising:a text data display unit for displaying the text data consisting of letters stored in said semiconductor storage card; a speech synthesis unit for performing speech synthesis on the basis of the intermediate language data stored in said semiconductor storage card; a synthesized speech outputting unit for outputting the synthesized speech as synthesized by means of said speech synthesis unit; and a control unit for synchronizing said text data display unit and said synthesized speech outputting unit with each other, wherein signals indicative of forwarding and rewinding are detected; wherein when the signal indicative of forwarding is detected during the period in which said electronic speaking document viewer is outputting the synthesized speech, the sentence to be reproduced with synthesized speech is determined in accordance with the a repeat count of the forwarding signal in order to forward to the top of a sentence after the current sentence and to perform the speech synthesis; and wherein when the signal indicative of rewinding is detected during the period in which said electronic speaking document viewer is outputting the synthesized speech, the sentence to be reproduced with synthesized speech is determined in accordance with the repeat count of the rewinding signal in order to back up to the top of a sentence preceding the current sentence and to perform the speech synthesis.