In this paper an inventory of acoustic building units (ABUs) used for the synthesis of
Arabic speech is presented. The ABUs are generated for the free programmable PCF-8200
formant synthesizer chip which has been used in the development of the real time text-to-speech
multilingual system, the MULTIVOX. To utilize these ABUs for the synthesis of
Arabic speech a set of 36 Arabic sounds and all their possible combinations are defined.
The inventory of 255 ABUs is designed that each sound combination can be built up by
using some of those ABUs. A grapheme-to-phone-code converter is designed so to convert
the written input text into its equivalent phone-codes. Furthermore, it contains solutions
for the difficult phonetic problems in the Arabic input text