Constructing a Multilingual Phoneme List for Polyglot Speech Synthesiser

We describe our approach to construct a phoneme set for polyglot speech synthesis. In polyglot speech synthesis, resources are shared across languages. The goal of this research is to develop global phoneme set using existing resources. Therefore, MBROLA has been selected. In MBROLA, there are 72 diphone databases of different languages. For each database, there is a set of phonemes used. We have selected 31 language databases out of the 72 diphone databases in MBROLA. By reusing existing resources, we would be able to gather global phoneme set in faster and wider language coverage. Therefore it would be able to be used for language that has limited linguistic expertise or limited linguistics resources. Our approach includes the process of extracting the phonemes of these languages, clustering, eliminating and substituting inaccurate phonemes and finally evaluating the list of phonemes obtained. At the end of this study, we are able to come out with one complete list of a global phoneme set. This list can be use as a substitution for unavailable phonemes in future polyglot TTS systems. It is also suitable to be used as a default phoneme set for new languages if the new languages’ phoneme set is not yet defined.