Festival-si: A Sinhala Text-to-Speech System

Abstract

This paper brings together the development of the first Text-to-Speech (TTS) system for Sinhala using the Festival framework and practical applications of it. Construction of a diphone database and implementation of the natural language processing modules are described. The paper also presents the development methodology of direct Sinhala Unicode text input by rewriting Letter-to-Sound rules in Festival's context sensitive rule format and the implementation of Sinhala syllabification algorithm. A Modified Rhyme Test (MRT) was conducted to evaluate the intelligibility of the synthesized speech and yielded a score of 71.5% for the TTS system described.