Chinese Talking Clock

The clock grammar: informal, as in normal conversation.

Pinyin-to-Sound Rule: Each unit in pinyin is treated as a Chinese phone, plus these allophones:

a --> ae /i_n
o --> u /{a_}
e --> ae /{i, u:}_
i --> ri /{zh, ch, sh, r}_
i --> si /{z,c,s}_
u --> u: /y_

Use English phones to approximate Chinese phones:

Here's the English voice approximation of the sentence: (click on the sentence to hear the wav file)

Tones are added to the lexicon as stresses.
The true Chinese recordings are then aligned with the prompts of English approximations to build the limited domain voice.
Units are selected among those with the same tone.

And samples of the final synthesized Chinese Talking Clock (pre-synthesized wav files):