Text To Speech System for Telugu Language

Telugu is one of the oldest languages in India. This paper describes the development of Telugu Text-to-Speech System (TTS).In Telugu TTS the input is Telugu text in Unicode. The voices are sampled from real recorded speech. The objective of a text to speech system is to convert an arbitrary text into its corresponding spoken waveform. Speech synthesis is a process of building machinery that can generate human-like speech from any text input to imitate human speakers. Text processing and speech generation are two main components of a text to speech system. To build a natural sounding speech synthesis system, it is essential that text processing component produce an appropriate sequence of phonemic units. Generation of sequence of phonetic units for a given standard word is referred to as letter to phoneme rule or text to phoneme rule. The complexity of these rules and their derivation depends upon the nature of the language. The quality of a speech synthesizer is judged by its closeness to the natural human voice and understandability. In this paper we described an approach to build a Telugu TTS system using concatenative synthesis method with syllable as a basic unit of concatenation.