A Rule-Based Concatenative Approach to Speech Synthesis in Indian Language Text-to-Speech Systems

Several text-to-speech (TTS) systems are available today for languages such as English, Japanese, and Chinese, but still Indian languages are lacking behind in terms of good quality synthesized speech. Even though almost all Indian languages share a common phonetic base, till now a usable TTS system for all official Indian languages is not available. Also the existing speech synthesis techniques are found to be less effective in the scripting format of Indian languages. Considering the intelligibility of speech production and increasing memory requirement for Indian language TTS systems, in this paper we have proposed a rule-based concatenative technique for speech synthesis in Indian languages. It is being compared with the existing technique and the results of our experiments show our technique outperforms the existing technique.

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