Converting numbers into english words

Abstract

In vehicle navigation we are now accustomed to a friendly voice that offers directions or even reduces driving distances. For a long time natural speech was an unsolved problem for computers. In this chapter the author demonstrates that even just pronouncing long numbers involves considerable computational effort. By showing how the algorithm is developed intuitively he also teaches us about the way humans generate English-language number texts. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.