Decision rules for allophone synthesis of Malay text-to-speech system

This paper presents a method for Malay text-to-speech synthesis using allophone synthesis technique. In this work, allophone synthesis is implemented with a set of decision rules which are developed to analyze the phonemes of Malay text and assists in selecting appropriate allophones for speech synthesis in the SPO256 speech narrator processor. The decision rules are found to be reliable when tested with 15 samples of Malay words. Speech of good clarity and pleasant pronunciation is successfully synthesized.