Implementation of a TTS system for Devanagari Konkani language using Festival

Abstract

Text to Speech (TTS) Synthesizer is an application that converts text to speech. Development of speech synthesis system is a challenging task as the input text may come in an ambiguous form, different words are pronounced in different ways thus requiring efforts during text pre-processing. This paper discusses the various aspects of Festival and Festvox framework in Linux environment and its use for the implementation of a TTS system for Devanagari Konkani language. Festival does not provide complete language processing support to various languages. The experimental results with a text segment of 100 Konkani sentences shows that 64 percent word phonetization accuracy is obtained thus indicating scope for improvement in the quality of the output speech if segment of voice used are higher than unit selection voices.