Development and integration of Text to Speech Usability Interface for Visually Impaired Users in Yoruba language.

Text to Speech system (TTS) cannot be overlooked because of the important roles it performs in enabling the user to access the voice output of the input text. Text To Speech is a system that takes text as input and produces the equivalent natural human voice of the text input. The system has been applied in different native languages outside Nigeria. In this paper, we considered development of Text to speech in Yoruba language to assist Yoruba language speaking people especially the visually impaired users, it also helps the users that want to learn Yoruba language from scratch, the aspect of how to learn, pronounce Yoruba language syllable formation from consonant and vowel. The performance of the model was also measured using a standard error metric. There are several methods which TTS system have been applied in other part of the world but concatenative method of speech synthesis through syllable construction algorithm; was implemented using C# Programming language. The performance of the system was measured and the quality of synthesized speech was assessed using Mean Opinion Score (MOS) tool and the system is found to be 4.46 and 3.82 respectively. The MOS scale interpreted the system as a good system.