Text to Speech Synthesis System for Tamil

In a text-to-speech system, spoken utterances are automatically produced from text. In this paper, we present a corpus-driven Tamil text-to-speech (TTS) system based on the concatenative synthesis approach. The most important qualities of a synthesized speech are naturalness and intelligibility. In this system, words and syllables are used as the basic units for synthesis. Our corpus consists of speech waveforms that are collected for most frequently used words in different domains. The speaker is selected through subjective and objective evaluation of natural and synthesized waveform. The proposed system provides utility to save the synthesized output. The output generated by the proposed Tamil text-to-speech synthesis system resembles natural human voice. Our text to speech reader software converts a Tamil text to speech wav file that has high rates of intelligibility and comprehensibility. Keywords-Text-to-Speech, Syllabification, Concatenation, Speech Synthesis, Text Normalization.