IMPLEMENTATION OF TURKISH TEXT-TO-SPEECH SYNTHESIS ON A VOICE SYNTHESIZER CARD WITH PROSODIC FEATURES

Year 2017, Volume: 18 Issue: 3, 584 - 594, 30.09.2017

Hakan Tora , İbrahim Baran Uslu , Timur Karamehmet

https://doi.org/10.18038/aubtda.283172

Cited By: 1

Abstract

This study is on hardware implementation of the Turkish text-to-speech
(TTS) synthesis with a voice synthesizer card. Here, a fully functional TTS
system, capable of synthesizing every Turkish text, including abbreviations,
numbers, etc. is designed and implemented. The system is additionally enriched
by applying some prosodic attributes for more intelligible and natural speech
production. A set of rules required for proper pronunciation and stress
patterns are precisely defined in a lexicon utilized for synthesizing Turkish
speech. Performance of the developed system is assessed by the Mean Opinion
Score (MOS) test. An average score of 3.8 out of 5 is achieved. It indicates
that the proposed synthesizer can be successfully integrated to many practical
Turkish TTS applications.

Keywords

Text-to-Speech synthesis, RC8660 voice synthesizer, phonetic transcription, prosody, Turkish syllabic structure, MOS test

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