A prosodic Text-to-Speech system for Yorùbá language

• Published in: 8th International Conference for Internet Technology and Secured Transactions (ICITST-2013) pp. 630 - 635
• Main Authors: Akinwonmi, Akintoba Emmanuel, Alese, Boniface Kayode
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: Infonomics Society 01-12-2013
• Subjects: Estimation; Hidden Markov models; Prosody; Speech; Speech synthesis; Syntactics; Text-to-Speech; Yoruba TTS
• DOI: 10.1109/ICITST.2013.6750279

We reviewed prosody realization in Text-to-Speech (TTS) applications. Standard Yoruba (SY) was considered alongside. Our review showed that the language is under-researched in the area of prosody and speech synthesis generally. Some technologies that produced good prosody in certain syllable based languages were identified. These include the use of polysyllabic units, diphones and Hidden Markov's Model (HMM). We recommended a fusion of these technologies to realize the Yoruba TTS of high prosody. A mean opinion score (MOS) is also proposed to ascertain naturalness of the proposed TTS. This report presents among others, the review of prosody techniques in TTS, challenges of a Yoruba TTS and the proposed solution.