Development of isiXhosa text-to-speech modules to support e-Services in marginalized rural areas

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) projects are being initiated and deployed in marginalized areas to help improve the standard of living for community members. This has lead to a new field, which is responsible for information processing and knowledge development in rural areas, called Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICT4D). An ICT4D projects has been implemented in a marginalized area called Dwesa; this is a rural area situated in the wild coast of the former homelandof Transkei, in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. In this rural community there are e-Service projects which have been developed and deployed to support the already existent ICT infrastructure. Some of these projects include the e-Commerce platform, e-Judiciary service, e-Health and e-Government portal. Although these projects are deployed in this area, community members face a language and literacy barrier because these services are typically accessed through English textual interfaces. This becomes a challenge because their language of communication is isiXhosa and some of the community members are illiterate. Most of the rural areas consist of illiterate people who cannot read and write isiXhosa but can only speak the language. This problem of illiteracy in rural areas affects both the youth and the elderly. This research seeks to design, develop and implement software modules that can be used to convert isiXhosa text into natural sounding isiXhosa speech. Such an application is called a Text-to-Speech (TTS) system. The main objective of this research is to improve ICT4D eServices’ usability through the development of an isiXhosa Text-to-Speech system. This research is undertaken within the context of Siyakhula Living Lab (SLL), an ICT4D intervention towards improving the lives of rural communities of South Africa in an attempt to bridge the digital divide. Thedeveloped TTS modules were subsequently tested to determine their applicability to improve eServices usability. The results show acceptable levels of usability as having produced audio utterances for the isiXhosa Text-To-Speech system for marginalized areas

Tools for the development of a Hindi speech synthesis system

We describe in detail a Grapheme-to-Phoneme (G2P) converter required for the development of a good quality Hindi Text-to-Speech (TTS) system. The Festival framework is chosen for developing the Hindi TTS system. Since Festival does not provide complete language processing support specific to various languages, it needs to be augmented to facilitate the development of TTS systems in certain new languages. Because of this, a generic G2P converter has been developed. In the customized Hindi G2P converter, we have handled schwa deletion and compound word extraction. In the experiments carried out to test the Hindi G2P on a text segment of 3485 words, 97.67 % word phonetisation accuracy is obtained. This Hindi G2P has been used for phonetising large text corpora which in turn is used in designing an inventory of phonetically rich sentences. The sentences ensured a good coverage of the phonetically valid diphones using only 0.3 % of the complete text corpora. 1