Developing Speech Synthesis for Under-Resourced Languages by “Faking it”: An Experiment with Somali

Abstract

Speech synthesis or text-to-speech (TTS) systems are currently available for a number of the world's major languages, but for thousands of other, unsupported, languages no such technology is available. While awaiting the development of such technology, we propose using an existing TTS system for a major language (the base language, BL) to "fake" TTS for an unsupported language (the target language, TL). This paper describes the factors which determine the choice of a suitable BL for a given TL, and describe an experiment with a fake Somali TTS system evaluated in the real-life situation of a doctor–patient dialogue. 28 Somali participants were asked to judge the comprehensibility of 25 short Somali sentences recorded with a German TTS system. Results suggest that "faking it" provides reasonable stop-gap TTS for unsupported languages.

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