Usability of text-to-speech synthesis to bridge the digital divide in South Africa: Language practitioner perspectives

Schlunz, Georg I2020-03-242020-03-242018-12Schlunz, G.I. 2018. Usability of text-to-speech synthesis to bridge the digital divide in South Africa: Language practitioner perspectives. In: 2018 International Conference on Intelligent & Innovative Computing Applications (ICONIC), Holiday Inn Mon Tresor, Mauritius, 6-7 December 2018978-1-5386-6476-6http://mauricon.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Mauricon-2018-Conference-Proceedings-44423-041218.pdfhttp://hdl.handle.net/10204/11382Copyright 2019 The Authors. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.We report on two sets of perceptual evaluations of our South African text-to-speech voices by language practitioners. In the first evaluation, we measure baseline quality in terms of how understandable and human-like the voices sound. We also determine baseline usability by asking a series of questions related to accessibility and mainstream application settings. In the second evaluation, we employ the same criteria to compare pronunciation improvements against the baseline. The results indicate success in many areas, but also illuminate room for improvement in others, especially in the cases of the African languages.enAccessibilityDigital divideLanguage practitionersPerceptual evaluationSouth African languagesText-to-speech synthesisUsability of text-to-speech synthesis to bridge the digital divide in South Africa: Language practitioner perspectivesConference PresentationSchlunz, G. I. (2018). Usability of text-to-speech synthesis to bridge the digital divide in South Africa: Language practitioner perspectives. IEEE. http://hdl.handle.net/10204/11382Schlunz, Georg I. "Usability of text-to-speech synthesis to bridge the digital divide in South Africa: Language practitioner perspectives." (2018): http://hdl.handle.net/10204/11382Schlunz GI, Usability of text-to-speech synthesis to bridge the digital divide in South Africa: Language practitioner perspectives; IEEE; 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/10204/11382 .TY - Conference Presentation AU - Schlunz, Georg I AB - We report on two sets of perceptual evaluations of our South African text-to-speech voices by language practitioners. In the first evaluation, we measure baseline quality in terms of how understandable and human-like the voices sound. We also determine baseline usability by asking a series of questions related to accessibility and mainstream application settings. In the second evaluation, we employ the same criteria to compare pronunciation improvements against the baseline. The results indicate success in many areas, but also illuminate room for improvement in others, especially in the cases of the African languages. DA - 2018-12 DB - ResearchSpace DP - CSIR KW - Accessibility KW - Digital divide KW - Language practitioners KW - Perceptual evaluation KW - South African languages KW - Text-to-speech synthesis LK - https://researchspace.csir.co.za PY - 2018 SM - 978-1-5386-6476-6 T1 - Usability of text-to-speech synthesis to bridge the digital divide in South Africa: Language practitioner perspectives TI - Usability of text-to-speech synthesis to bridge the digital divide in South Africa: Language practitioner perspectives UR - http://hdl.handle.net/10204/11382 ER -