A complete text-to-speech synthesis system in Tamil

We report the design and development of Thirukkural, the first text-to-speech converter in Tamil. Syllables of different lengths have been selected as units since Tamil is a syllabic language. An automatic segmentation algorithm has been devised for segmenting syllables into consonant and vowel. The units are pitch marked using the discrete cosine transform-spectral autocorrelation function (DCTSAF). Prosodic information is captured in tables based on extensive observation of spoken Tamil. During synthesis, DCT based pitch modification is applied for both waveform interpolation and modifying pitch contour for different sentence modalities. Thirukkural is designed in VC++ and runs on Windows 95/98/NT. Perceptual evaluation by natives show that the synthesized speech is intelligible and fairly natural.