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

A Context-based Numeral Reading Technique for Text to Speech Systems

“…As compared to English, most of the Indian languages have approximately twice as many vowels and consonants along with a number of possible conjunct characters formed by combination of two or more characters [28]. Therefore, a large number of speech units are needed to be stored in the speech database while a concatenative speech synthesis technique is used for producing uninterrupted speech.…”

“…These fractions durations are considered for the waveform concatenation process to obtain the desired speech units. While the rule-based concatenative technique (RCT) [28] uses a static fraction duration for concatenation the use of dynamic fraction durations in WCT [29] enhances the quality of speech being produced. This fraction based concatenation process is considered for the dependent type of unit pairs such as Consonants attached to Matra/Fala/Halant/Consonants and the whole wavedata is used for producing the independent unit pairs like Consonants attached to Consonant/ Vowel, Vowels attacched to Consonants/Vowels.…”

“…The focus of this paper is to address the context based numeral pronunciation in Indian language scenario. There are only fewer models documented for speech synthesis in Indian languages [20]- [24], however the context dependent numeral pronunciations has not been well addressed [25]- [28]. The dhvani TTS system for Indian language [25], maintains the pronunciations of numerals up to hundred as the phonetic representation and use the position pronunciations for 'hundred', 'thousand', etc positions attached to the "up to hundred pronunciation" for reading the numerals.…”

A Pronunciation Rule-Based Speech Synthesis Technique for Odia Numerals

“…Instead of storing hundreds of recorded speech units in the database to achieve highly natural speech segments, RCT [9] uses only 35 basic speech units of the consonant (C) and vowel (V) sounds and derive all other sound units from these basic units using a rule based waveform concatenation technique. Figure 1 shows the portion concatenation process to produce the sound "\re" from "\ra" and "\ae" in RCT.…”