A Context-based Numeral Reading Technique for Text to Speech Systems

Abstract

This paper presents a novel technique for context based numeral reading in Indian language text to speech systems. The model uses a set of rules to determine the context of the numeral pronunciation and is being integrated with the waveform concatenation technique to produce speech out of the input text in Indian languages. For this purpose, the three Indian languages Odia, Hindi and Bengali are considered. To analyze the performance of the proposed technique, a set of experiments are performed considering different context of numeral pronunciations and the results are compared with existing syllable-based technique. The results obtained from different experiments shows the effectiveness of the proposed technique in producing intelligible speech out of the entered text utterances compared to the existing technique even with very less storage and execution time.