Concatenative Text-to-speech (Tts) Synthesis for the Amharic Language
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Date
2003-06
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
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.
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Information Science