Open-source text-to-speech (TTS) software has enabled the development of voices in multiple languages, including many high-resource languages, such as English and European languages. However, building voices for low-resource languages is still challenging. We describe the development of TTS systems for 12 Indian languages using the Festvox framework, for which we developed a common frontend for Indian languages. Voices for eight of these 12 languages are available for use with Flite, a lightweight, fast run-time synthesizer, and the Android Flite app available in the Google Play store. Recently, the baseline Punjabi TTS voice was built end-to-end in a month by two undergraduate students (without any prior knowledge of TTS) with help from two of the authors of this paper. The framework can be used to build a baseline Indic TTS voice in two weeks, once a text corpus is selected and a suitable native speaker is identified.
Cite as: Wilkinson, A., Parlikar, A., Sitaram, S., White, T., Black, A.W., Bazaj, S. (2016) Open-Source Consumer-Grade Indic Text To Speech. Proc. 9th ISCA Workshop on Speech Synthesis Workshop (SSW 9), 190-195, doi: 10.21437/SSW.2016-31
@inproceedings{wilkinson16_ssw,
author={Andrew Wilkinson and Alok Parlikar and Sunayana Sitaram and Tim White and Alan W. Black and Suresh Bazaj},
title={{Open-Source Consumer-Grade Indic Text To Speech}},
year=2016,
booktitle={Proc. 9th ISCA Workshop on Speech Synthesis Workshop (SSW 9)},
pages={190--195},
doi={10.21437/SSW.2016-31}
}