This is a paper I presented at the 1995 Annual International Voice Technologies Conference about work I did jointly with Judy Delin. Most people would agree that the intonation of synthesized voices sounds unnatural. There have been attempts to improve this based on syntax, but those attempts have had limited success. This paper describes a system we developed that produced spoken directions in a dialogue system. I was very fortunate to have worked with Judy Delin.
Delin, Judy and Ron Zacharski. 1995. Pragmatic factors in the production of intonation contours for conversational systems. Proceedings of the Annual International Voice Technologies Conference 14.55-63. (PDF)