Abstract
This paper brings together the development of the first Text-to- Speech (TTS) system for Sinhala using the Festival framework and practical applications of it. Construction of a diphone database and implementation of the natural language processing modules are described. The paper also presents the development methodology of direct Sinhala Unicode text input by rewriting letter-to-sound rules in Festival’s context sensitive rule format and the implementation of Sinhala syllabification algorithm. A Modified Rhyme Test (MRT) was conducted to evaluate the intelligibility of the synthesized speech and yielded a score of 71.5% for the TTS system described.
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Weerasinghe, R., Wasala, A., Welgama, V., Gamage, K. (2007). Festival-si: A Sinhala Text-to-Speech System. In: Matoušek, V., Mautner, P. (eds) Text, Speech and Dialogue. TSD 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 4629. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-74628-7_61
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-74628-7_61
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-74627-0
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