Design of an advanced Text-To-Speech system for Afrikaans

Afrikaans is the home language to approximately six million people in South Africa. The need for an Afrikaans TTS system comes with the growing interest in integrating speech technology in all eleven languages of the country. The ultimate goal here is to enable communication between man and machine using speech. This can be achieved with the use of speech technology by implementing multilingual technological systems that all the people in South Africa can understand and relate to. Understandability, flexibility, naturalness and pleasantnedd are the requirements of an advanced TTS system. The technique of concatentative speech synthesis has been the most successful in meeting all these requirements. The Festival speech synthesis system uses two popular concatenative techniques to design new TTS systems in different languages. The techniques are: diphone concatenative synthesis (DCS) and unit selection synthesis (USS).

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

Department of Electrical Engineering

Year dc:date.issued

2006

Author dc:creator

• Rousseau, Francois

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Mashao, Daniel

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/11427/5112

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:open.uct.ac.za:11427/5112