1. Text To Speech
“OR”
Speech Synthesis
Thin Zar Phyo
Team Leader
Myanmar Text to Speech Project
thinzarlayster@gmail.com

2. Outline
• Introduction
Language
Language Processing
• Myanmar Text To Speech

3. Introduction
• speech and language were already
important parts of daily life before the
invention of the computer, the equipment
and technology

4. Language ?
• What is Language?
– Spoken + Written
• How many .. ?

5. • Human
• Animal

6. AI

7. • Natural Language Processing (NLP)
– Machine Translation
– Question and answering
– Expert System
• Image Processing
– OCR
– OMR
• Speech Processing
– TTS
– Voice Recg
• ….

8. NLP
Speech
Processing
Image
Processing
Text
Processing
NLU

9. TTS or Speech Synthesis
NLP
+
Speech Processing/Technology
Digital Signal Processing Module (DSP)
•

10. Motivation
• Since speech is such a natural medium for
communication, users' expectations of a
speech application tend to be extremely
high.
• Not only for blind, but also when our hands
and eyes are busy –
• People use airline information system,
banking, ordering, reservation system
used at a hotel,

11. 1st TTS System
• One of the first practical application of speech
synthesis was in 1936 when the U.K. Telephone
Company introduced a speaking clock.
• Speech synthesis as software or as an integral
part of the operating system was introduced in
the beginning of the 1980s on computers such
as Apple Macintosh.

12. • Myanmar Text To Speech
or
• Myanmar speech synthesizer
OR
• TTS Engine

13. TTS Synthesizer
• Generating natural sounding speech on
the fly, usually from text.
• A text to speech synthesizer is a computer
based system that should be able to read
any text.
• Speech should be intelligible and natural.

14. • Myanmar Text To Speech Synthesizer
Myanmar Text To Speech Engine Type License Copyright
1st
Version
31 May,2015 1st V Desktop Opensource IT Team, Myanmar
Christian Fellowship
of the Blind
2nd Version 30
November,
2015
2nd V Web
Service
Opensource
Starting Date : 1st December, 2014

15. Technology & Platform
• Core Technologies
– C++
– Java
– .
• Platforms
– Ubuntu
– Window

16. Architecture

17. Basic Part of TTS
1. Text Analysis
 Normalization
2. Linguistic Analysis
 G2P
3. Waveform generation
 Waveform Analysis

18. Two Basic Strategies
• Dictionary based
• Rule-based
• Statistical
• Hybrid
• …

19. Current Situation
• Development
– Speech Synthesizer with The Festival
• Language Resources
– Myanmar Lexicon
– Speech Database
• Research
– Prosodic Analysis in Burmese
– Grapheme to Phoneme

20. Future
• Related work
– OCR
– MT
– …
• advances related fundamental
technologies such as
– multi-lingual speech translation
– multi-lingual speech transcription
– multi- lingual information retrieval

21. Conclusion
• The described speech synthesis system is
the open source.
• Contribution