247 / 2017-01-16 01:17:27

Syllable as the Basic Unit for Kannada Speech Synthesis

Speech is the primary mode of communication. Speech synthesis is a very important application in the linguistic communication process. Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech using a computer system. A text to speech synthesis(TTS) system converts text into speech. TTS can be developed using synthesis methods like formant synthesis, articulatory synthesis, and concatenative synthesis. This paper describes concatenative speech synthesis using syllable as a basic unit of concatenation. A syllable is the basic unit of language, which may be spoken independently of adjacent phones. The primary reason for choosing the syllable as a basic unit is that the Indian languages are syllable centered. This work proposes syllable based speech units for concatenative speech synthesis for the Kannada language. This takes into account the position of the syllables in a word which could be the start, middle or the end position in a word. This work is divided into multiple steps, the entered text file is analyzed first then syllabication is performed based on the syllabification rules of Kannada language later the syllables are stored separately in a variable. Finally, the corresponding speech file for the syllable is retrieved and concatenated with corresponding speech file and the resulting synthesized speech is produced with a good quality.