A Complete Text-to-Speech Synthesis System in Tamil

Rama, Jayavardhana GL and Ramakrishnan, AG and Muralishankar, R and Prathibha, P (2002) A Complete Text-to-Speech Synthesis System in Tamil. In: 2002 IEEE Workshop on Speech Synthesis, 11-13 September, Santa Monica,CA, pp. 191-194.

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Abstract

We report the design and development of Thirukkural, the first text-to-speech converter in Tamil. Syllables of different lengths have been selected as units since Tamil is a syllabic language. An automatic segmentation algorithm [8] has been devised for segmenting syllables into consonant and vowel. The units are pitch marked using the discrete cosine transform-spectral autocorrelation function (DCTSAF) [6]. Prosodic information is captured in tables based on extensive observation of spoken Tamil. During synthesis, DCT based pitch modification [3][7][11] is applied for both waveform interpolation and modifying pitch contour for different sentence modalities. Thirukkural is designed in VC++ and runs on Windows 95/98/NT. Perceptual evaluation by natives show that the synthesized speech is intelligible and fairly natural.

Item Type:	Conference Paper
Publisher:	IEEE
Additional Information:	Copyright 1990 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.
Department/Centre:	Division of Electrical Sciences > Electrical Engineering
Date Deposited:	18 Jan 2006
Last Modified:	19 Sep 2010 04:22
URI:	http://eprints.iisc.ac.in/id/eprint/5147

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