Dravidian - Tamil Tts for Interactive Voice Response System
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Abstract
Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A Text-To-Speech (TTS) system converts normal language text into speech automatically. The main application of Tamil TTS is aid to vocally handicapped guys. In this paper, we present a Dravidian - Tamil text-to-speech system based on the concatenative synthesis approach. Concatenative speech synthesis involves the concatenation of the basic units to synthesize an intelligent, natural sounding speech. The database consisting of the units along with their annotated information is called as the annotated speech corpus. Here, the entered text file analyzed first, syllabication is performed based on the syllabification rules and the syllables are stored separately. Then the corresponding speech file for the syllables are retrieved, concatenated and the silence present in the concatenated speech is removed and the synthesized speech is produced with good quality. Finally, the Smoothening with Optimal Coupling technique is applied for smooth the transition between concatenated speech segments in order to produce continuous output and the system resembles natural human voice. The most important qualities of a synthesized speech are naturalness and intelligibility.