HMM-based speech synthesis system incorporated with language identification for low-resourced languages

Abstract

Text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis systems are of benefit towards learning new or foreign languages. These systems are currently available for various major languages but not available for low-resourced languages. Scarcity of these systems may lead to challenges in learning new languages specifically low-resourced languages. Development of language-specific systems like TTS and Language identification (LID) have an important task to address in mitigating the historical linguistic effects of discrimination and domination imposed onto low-resourced indigenous languages. This paper presents the development of a multi-language LID+TTS synthesis system that generate audio of input text using the predicted language in four South African languages, namely: Tshivenda, Sepedi, Xitsonga and IsiNdebele. On the front-end, is the LID module that detects language of the input text before the TTS synthesis module produces output audio. The LID module is trained on a 4 million words dataset resulted with 99% accuracy outperforming the state-of-the-art systems. A robust method for building TTS voices called hidden Markov model method is used to build new voices in the selected languages. The quality of the voices is measured using the mean opinion score and word error rate metrics that resulted with positive results on the understandability, naturalness, pleasantness, intelligibility and overall impression of the system of the newly created TTS voices. The system is available as a website service.