Text-to-speech synthesis useful for visually challenged, 27 june

IIT Mandi hosted the second workshop on Text-to-speech synthesis (TTS) in which the coordinators and project staff from all 12 institutes and companies involved with the project—IIT Madras, CDAC Tiruvananthapuram, CDAC Mumbai, CDAC Kolkata, IIIT Hyderabad, IISc Bangalore, IIT Guwahati, SSNCE Chennai, University of Gauhati, DA-IICT Gujarat, IIT Kharagpur, IIT Mandi—participated. The two-day workshop was organised on June 14th-15th, 2013 at the Kamand campus.

In the text-to-speech synthesis (TTS) systems, speech waveform is generated from the given text. It can be a promising device to readout the information from cellphones where reading text is difficult due to its small displays and extremely useful for “visually challenged” to get into the mainstream society.

The project for Development of TEXT to SPEECH SYSTEM in Indian Languages is sponsored by DIT (Department of Information Technology). In the workshop, a live system was shown which could synthesize the speech waveform in 12 different Indian languages. All the TTS systems were build using common platform (open source code). Members of the consortium working on the project have also demonstrated the small footprint of TTS system which can be ported in Android platform-based mobile phones.

The progress made by the team working on the project was appreciated by the Director, IIT Mandi, Prof. T. A. Gonsalves and the Dean (Academics) Prof. Ramesh Orunganti. In the workshop, various issues concerning the project were discussed like the research issues to improve the naturalness and intelligibility of synthesized speech; importance of developing TTS system for a new language with a very small amount of speech data and action plan for the next year to improve the existing TTS system.