A Novel Approach to Develop Speech Database for Kannada Text-to-Speech System

Electronic Speech synthesis is a process of generating human-like speech from any text input to emulate human speaker. The objective of a text to speech system is to convert an arbitrary text into its corresponding spoken waveform. Text processing and speech generation are two main components of a text to speech system. To build a natural sounding speech synthesis system, it is essential that text processing component produce an appropriate sequence of phonemic units. The quality of a speech synthesizer is judged by its closeness to the natural human voice and understandability. This paper presents a novel approach to build Speech Database for Kannada TTS system and uses Unit Selection-Concatenation algorithm for generating synthesized speech.