TBT (Toolkit to Build TTS): A High Performance Framework to Build Multiple Language HTS Voice

With the development of high quality TTS systems, application area of synthetic speech is increasing rapidly. Beyond the communication aids for the visually impaired and vocally handicap, TTS voices are being used in various educational, telecommunication and multimedia applications. All around the world people are trying to build TTS voice for their regional languages. TTS voice building requires a number of steps to follow and involves use of multiple tools, which makes it time consuming, tedious and perplexing to a user. This paper describes a Toolkit developed for HMM-based TTS voice building that makes the process much easier and handy. The toolkit uses all required tools, viz. HTS, Festival, Festvox, Hybrid Segmentation Tool, etc. and handles each and every step starting from phone set creation, then prompt generation, hybrid segmentation, F0 range finding, voice building, and finally putting the built voice into Synthesis framework. Wherever possible it does parallel processing to reduce time. It saves manual effort and time to a large extent and enable a person to build TTS voice very easily. This toolkit is made available under Open Source license.