Adapting MaryTTS for Synthesizing Sinhalese Speech to Communicate with Children

Abstract

The majority of the Sri Lankan population speak Sinhala, which is also the country's mother tongue. Sinhala is a difficult language to learn by children aged between 1–6 years when compared to other languages. Text to speech system is popular among children who have difficulties with reading, especially those who struggle with decoding. By presenting the words auditorily, the child can focus on the meaning of words instead of spending all their brainpower trying to sound out the words. In Sri Lanka, however, computer systems based on the Sinhala language especially for children are extremely rare. In this situation having a Sinhala text-to-speech technology for communicating with children is a helpful option. Intelligibility should be considered deeply in this system because this is specific for children. Recordings of a native Sinhalese speaker were used to synthesize a natural-sounding voice, rather than a robotic voice. This paper proposes an approach of implementing a Sinhalese text-to-speech system for communicating with children using unit selection and HMM -based mechanisms in the MaryTTS framework. Although a work in progress, the intermediate findings have been presented.