An approach to building language-independent text-to-speech synthesis for Indian languages

Abstract

A popular speech synthesis method is the HMM based speech synthesis method. Given the phone set and question set for a language, HMM based synthesis systems are built. Although robotic in quality the systems are intelligible. In this paper, we propose a common framework for Indian languages with a common phone set and a common question set. Owing to this architecture it is possible to borrow independent monophone models across languages. Degradation MOS and word error rate scores are comparable to systems built in the conventional language-specific manner, indicating that system building can be made language-independent without much degradation in the quality of synthesised speech.