Browsing by Author "Lulseged, Henock"
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Item Concatenative Text-to-speech (Tts) Synthesis for the Amharic Language(Addis Ababa University, 2003-06) Lulseged, Henock; Berhanu Solomon (Ato); Abebe Ermias (Ato); Taddese Kinfe (Ato)In this study, the potential of developing an Amharic TTS system using the TD-PSOLA algorithm has been investigated. In doing this thesis work, the Delphi programming language and the MATLAB software have been used. Additionally, a spectrographic analysis tool called praat had been used for the purpose of data preparation. All the acoustic speech units have been extracted from a corpus recorded at a sampling rate of I 1,025, and the whole of the corpus had been recorded at one time. Two acoustic unit types have been extracted from the corpus data: diaphones and CY-Syllables. CY-Syllables are suitable for the Amharic language because most of the symbols in the Amharic writing system represent a CY -Syllable, and this makes tasks like grapheme-to-phoneme transcription easy. Due to time constraints only a limited number of CY-Syllables and dip hones have been extracted from the corpus. Testing performance of TTS systems is one of the difficult tasks because there is no single measure to pinpoint the quality of the system. Although no standard test is available, a number of testing methods have been developed. The Open Rhyme Test (ORT) and Mean Opinion Score (MOS) test have been used in this work to test performance. The results obtained from the experiment are promising and indicative of the possibility of producing high quality TTS system for Amharic using other advanced algorithms than the one used in this work.