Text to speech synthesis for ethiopian semitic languages: Issues and the way forward

Currently there is a tremendous increase in electronic text in various languages, including Ethiopian Semitic languages. Yet, it is inaccessible to visually impaired people and the illiterate. To come up with high quality text to speech synthesizers for local languages, it is imperative that research in natural language processing and synthetic speech generation be improved. Accordingly, we critically reviewed core issues in text to speech synthesis for Ethiopian Semitic languages and revealed that further research to improve the quality of text to speech synthesis for Ethiopian Semitic languages is mandatory. To optimize linguistic resources required for high quality synthetic speech output we propose designing a generic bilingual Text to Speech framework for Ethiopian Semitic languages.