Selecting Appropriate Amharic Unit for Domain Specific Speech Synthesis: A Case for Mobile Phones
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Date
2008-10
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Speech synthesis – the production of artificial speech – has a lot of applications. Applying speech
synthesis onto mobile phones for Amharic language will be an important success in language
technology.
Mobile phones are characterized by smaller memory and processing capacity. The choice of a
unit for concatenation has an impact on the quality of the synthetic speech produced, the size of
the database that is used to store the speech units, and also the time required to synthesize a
speech. In this thesis, three Amharic units: phonemes, diphones, and syllables are compared.
Analysis is done on these units in terms of naturalness, intelligibility, memory requirement, and
processing time. The result shows that diphone based speech synthesis approach is the
appropriate alternative since it requires less memory and time, and provides reasonably
acceptable naturalness and intelligibility. The overall Mean Opinion Score obtained for
intelligibility and naturalness is 4.10 and 3.69, respectively.
Keywords: Speech Synthesis, Mobile Phones, Diphones, Amharic Language
Description
Keywords
Speech Synthesis, Mobile Phones, Diphones, Amharic Language