Work

TTS for Low Resource Languages: A Bangla Synthesizer

Year: 2016
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: We present a text-to-speech (TTS) system designed for the dialect of Bengali spoken in Bangladesh.This work is part of an ongoing effort to address the needs of under-resourced languages.We propose a process for streamlining the bootstrapping of TTS systems for under-resourced languages.First, we use crowdsourcing to collect the data from multiple ordinary speakers, each speaker recording small amount of sentences.Second, we leverage an existing text normalization system for a related language (Hindi) to bootstrap a linguistic front-end for Bangla.Third, we employ statistical techniques to construct multi-speaker acoustic models using Long Short-Term Memory Recurrent Neural Network (LSTM-RNN) and Hidden Markov Model (HMM) approaches.We then describe our experiments that show that the resulting TTS voices score well in terms of their perceived quality as measured by Mean Opinion Score (MOS) evaluations.
Language: English
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W2413439388
FWCI: 1.976
Cites: 25
Cited by: 29
Related to: 10