The Hindu Business Line : C-DAC gets enquiries for Malayalam text-to-speech system

THE Resource Centre for Indian Language Technology Solutions (RCILTS) at the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Thiruvananthapuram, has received a number of enquiries in respect of its Malayalam Text-To-Speech (TTS) system, `Subhashini'.

Non-governmental organisations that intend to introduce the system for the benefit of the visually challenged are among those who have approached the centre, according to Ms K.G. Sulochana, Deputy Director, RCILTS-Malayalam. The centre had earlier won recognition for its Malayalam Web-based mail server, "Sandesam". The State Information Technology Department is considering this email solution to be made available to the masses through the "Akshaya" bridge-the-digital-divide project being piloted in Malappuram district concurrently. The programme is scheduled to be rolled out state-wide in phases.

Subhashini is a Windows based software that converts Malayalam text files into fairly intelligible speech output. The software is integrated with a text editor having both ISCII (Indian Script Code for Information Interchange) and ISFOC (Intelligence Based Script Fond Code) support. The editor supports INSCRIPT keyboard layout. Developed in India, this layout answers the special needs of Indian languages and permits all Indian scripts to be typed in a common manner.

The TTS is based on speech synthesis by diaphonic concatenation and consists of the diaphone database and text processing modules, a prosodic rules generator and the speech synthesiser.

The diaphone database consists of 2,500 diaphones segmented from recorded words. All the commonly used allophones are also considered.

The text-processing module organises the input sentences into manageable lists of words. It also identifies the punctuation symbols, abbreviation, acronyms and digits in the input data and tags the input data. These are then processed and converted to phonetic language - a language that the speech engine is able to recognise.

Rules for adding prosody to the speech output are generated using the speech corpus. This includes the pitch and delay information for different intonations.

The concatenation of diaphones corresponding to the text is done in the synthesis module and we get speech output. Suitable applications include text-reading systems, announcement systems and systems providing voice interface.

C-DAC, Thiruvananthapuram, is one of the 13 resource centres set up across the country by the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology under the TDIL (Technology Development for Indian Languages) programme. The resource centres are aimed at taking IT to masses in their local languages and cater to all the constitutionally recognised Indian and some foreign languages.