Arabic Text-To-Speech Synthesizer

Many advances have already been made in Text-To-Speech Synthesizers (TTS). Researchers have been working aggressively on the field of speech synthesis, it is becoming more important everyday and its value prevailed in remedying many development and educational milestones, it is used in many applications and helped users drastically, specially those who need special care and support (such as blind, deafened and vocally handicapped) also speech synthesis help in education and excessive need for computers. Most of the research on TTS has been made on languages like English and French, while many other languages, like Arabic, have not been taken into consideration until recently and sufficient progress has not been made up to now, thus the area of Arabic text-to-speech systems is still in its early development stages. So the scope of this project is to develop guidelines for Arabic speech synthesis; to touch-up on the kind of challenges might face the scholars down this field when applied to Arabic language, so as to help making the future construction of Arabic voice more promising. This report presents a workable TTS system for Arabic that uses allophone/diphone concatenation method with two main modules: text/linguistic analyzer and synthesizer core. It takes a complex text as input (including abbreviations, numbers, dates, times, addresses or e-mails) and produces corresponding speech in Arabic. In this system, the output is available in one male voice only. Since Arabic is a verbal language, the developed TTS engine (synthesizer core) can be used also for other verbal languages with some minor modifications involving the phonetic representation of the specific target language together with the preparation and usage of a suitable phonetic database.