paper_intro_first_paragraph = 'In recent years, there has been a great interest in the techniques of speech synthesis. In applications where only a small number of words are to be spoken, real speech can be digitized, encoded, and stored for later decoding and playback on command. But for many applications, such as reading machines for the blind, stored speech is impractical. A preferred method for applications that demand real-time speech synthesis is text-to-speech conversion'