Development of personalised corpus using open source software

Text to speech synthesis means conversion of written text into spoken words. In order to make speech more natural and intelligible one way is to concatenate the prerecorded units of speech using unit selection algorithm. These units are stored in one place from where they are played back, called speech corpus. There are various standard corpuses available online for testing purposes. But most of the times we need domain specific databases for training and testing our speech synthesizer. For such situations we have discussed here the methodology for developing corpus using open source software. By implementing these series of steps any researcher can create their own database. This will work for emotional as well as normal speech and one can create database of any length. The database developed using this methodology has been tested using concatenative speech synthesis and satisfactory results were obtained.