In the field of natural language processing, language networks represent a method for observing linguistic units and their interactions in different linguistic contexts. This paper uses the previously presented Croatian language network for building a solution capable of generating spoken notifications in Croatian language. The novelty of this paper is that it proposes an approach for generating spoken notifications in smart environments by combining specialized services that enable interaction with the environment and human users. The process employed for generating spoken notifications is described in detail. Also, a novel contribution of this paper is the case-study evaluation of the proposed approach in a smart home environment.

Speech technologies have advanced significantly in the last decade, mostly due to rise in available computing power combined with novel approaches to natural language processing. As a result, speech-enabled systems have become popular commercial products, successfully integrated with various environments. However, this can be stated for English and a few other ?big? languages. From the perspective of a minority language, such as Croatian, there are many challenges ahead to achieve comparable results. In this paper, we propose a model for natural language generation and speech synthesis in a smart environment using Croatian language. The model is evaluated on 27 users to estimate the quality of user experience. The evaluation goal was to determine what users perceive to be more important ? generated speech quality or grammatical correctness of the spoken content. It is shown that most users perceived grammatically correct spoken texts as being of the highest quality.