A comparison between allophone, syllable, and diphone based TTS systems for Kurdish language

Author

Barkhoda, Wafa ; ZahirAzami, Bahram ; Bahrampour, Anvar ; Shahryari, Om-Kolsoom

Author_Institution

Dept. of Comput. & IT, Univ. of Kurdistan, Sanandaj, Iran

fYear

2009

fDate

14-17 Dec. 2009

Firstpage

557

Lastpage

562

Abstract

Nowadays, concatenative method is used in most modern TTS systems to produce artificial speech. The most important challenge in this method is choosing an appropriate unit for creating a database. This unit must warranty smoothness and high quality speech, and also, creating database for it must take reasonable resources and should be inexpensive. Syllable, phoneme, allophone, and, diphone are usually used as the units in such systems. In this paper, we implemented three synthesis systems for Kurdish language, respectively based on syllable, allophone, and diphone. We compare the quality of the three systems, using subjective tests.

Keywords

speech synthesis; text analysis; Kurdish language; allophone TTS systems; artificial speech; concatenative method; diphone TTS systems; high quality speech; phoneme; syllable TTS systems; text-to-speech; Application software; Computer interfaces; Databases; Information technology; Natural languages; Speech synthesis; Synthesizers; System testing; Telephony; Warranties; Allophone; Concatenative Method; Diphone; Kurdish TTS System; Speech Synthesis; Syllable;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Signal Processing and Information Technology (ISSPIT), 2009 IEEE International Symposium on

Conference_Location

Ajman

Print_ISBN

978-1-4244-5949-0

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ISSPIT.2009.5407540

Filename

5407540