Indian Language Screen Readers and Syllable Based Festival Text-to-Speech Synthesis System
Anila Susan Kurian, Badri Narayan, M. Nagarajan, Ashwin Bellur, Raghava Krishnan, G R Kasthuri, Vinodh M. Vishwanath, Kishore Prahallad, Hema A. Murthy · 2011
This paper describes the integration of commonly used screen readers, namely, NVDA [NVDA 2011] and ORCA [ORCA 2011] with Text to Speech (TTS) systems for Indian languages. A participatory design approach was followed in the development of the integrated system to ensure that the expectations of visually challenged people are met. Given that India is a multilingual country (22 official languages), a uniform framework for an integrated text-to-speech synthesis systems with screen readers across six Indian languages are developed, which can be easily extended to other languages as well. Since Indian languages are syllable centred, syllable-based concatenative speech synthesizers are built. This paper describes the development and evaluation of syllable-based Indian language Text-To-Speech (TTS) synthesis system (around festival TTS) with ORCA and NVDA, for Linux and Windows environments respectively. TTS systems for six Indian Languages,