Text to speech for Bangla language using festival

Abstract

In this paper, we present a Text to Speech (TTS) synthesis system for Bangla language using the opensource Festival TTS engine. Festival is a complete TTS synthesis system, with components supporting front-end processing of the input text, language modeling, and speech synthesis using its signal processing module. The Bangla TTS system proposed here, creates the voice data for festival, and additionally extends festival using its embedded scheme scripting interface to incorporate Bangla language support. Festival is a concatenative TTS system using diphone or other unit selection speech units. Our TTS implementation uses two different kinds of these concatenative methods supported in Festival: unit selection and multisyn unit selection. The modules of such a TTS system are described in this paper, followed by an evaluation of the quality of synthesized speech for acceptability and intelligibility.