computer science

Lessac Technologies

Lessac Technologies is a computer science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Lessac Technologies rather than just read about it. In short: Lessac Technologies, Inc. (LTI) is an American firm which develops voice synthesis software, licenses technology and sells synthesized novels as MP3 files.

Key takeaways

Lessac Technologies belongs to computer science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Lessac Technologies to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Lessac Technologies from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Lessac Technologies, Inc. (LTI) is an American firm which develops voice synthesis software, licenses technology and sells synthesized novels as MP3 files. The firm currently has seven patents granted and three more pending for its automated methods of converting digital text into human-sounding speech, more accurately recognizing human speech and outputting the text representing the words and phrases of said speech, along with recognizing the speaker's emotional state. The LTI technology is partly based on the work of the late Arthur Lessac, a Professor of Theater at the State University of New York and the creator of Lessac Kinesensic Training, and LTI has licensed exclusive rights to exploit Arthur Lessac's copyrighted works in the fields of speech synthesis and speech recognition. Based on the view that music is speech and speech is music, Lessac's work and books focused on body and speech energies and how they go together. Arthur Lessac's textual annotation system, which was originally developed to assist actors, singers, and orators in marking up scripts to prepare for performance, is adapted in LTI's speech synthesis system as the basic representation of the speech to be synthesized (Lessemes), in contrast to many other systems which use a phonetic representation. LTI's software has two major components: (1) a linguistic front-end that converts plain text to a sequence of prosodic and phonosensory graphic symbols (Lessemes) based on Arthur Lessac's annotation system, which specify the speech units to be synthesized; (2) a signal-processing back-end that takes the Lessemes as acoustic data and produces human-sounding synthesized speech as output, using unit selection and concatenation. LTI's text-to-speech system came in second in the world-wide Blizzard Challenge 2011 and 2012. The first-place team in 2011 also employed LTI's "front-end" technology, but with its own back-end. The Blizzard Challenge, conducted by the Language Technologies Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, was devised as a way to evaluate speech synthesis techniques by having different research groups build voices from the same voice-actor recordings, and comparing the results through listening tests. LTI was founded in 2000 by H. Donald Wilson (chairman), a lawyer, LexisNexis entrepreneur and business associate of Arthur Lessac; and Gary A. Marple (chief inventor), after Marple suggested that Arthur Lessac's kinesensic voice training might be applicable to computational linguistics. After Wilson's death in 2006, his nephew John Reichenbach became the firm's CEO.

References

External links Company web site

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Lessac Technologies

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Lessac Technologies claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In computer science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Lessac Technologies before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Lessac Technologies ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Lessac Technologies

In research: Lessac Technologies appears in computer science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Lessac Technologies in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Lessac Technologies is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Computational linguistics, Natural language processing, Speech recognition software, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Lessac Technologies outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Lessac Technologies in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Lessac Technologies means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Lessac Technologies out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Lessac Technologies in simple terms?

Lessac Technologies, Inc. (LTI) is an American firm which develops voice synthesis software, licenses technology and sells synthesized novels as MP3 files.

Why does Lessac Technologies matter?

Because it connects several computer science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Lessac Technologies?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Lessac Technologies.