Development of Speech Database for Hindi Text-To-Speech System Considering Syllable as a Basic Unit

The objective of a Text- to- speech system is to convert an orthographic text into intelligible and natural sounding speech. In order to achieve this, unit selection plays a vital role. Phoneme, diphone, allophone and syllable are the basic units of speech system. Considering phoneme as a basic unit for concatenation based TTS system results in larger concatenation points, this result in low quality speech output. Considering syllable as basic unit for database building results in less concatenation points and results in high quality speech output. Hence this work reveals building of standard text database required to build syllable level speech database considering position of syllable in a word i.e. Start, Middle and End. This database consists of 1326 standard and non-standard words and 442 syllables in Start, middle and end position respectively.