A Human Quality Text to Speech System for Sinhala

Lakshika Nanayakkara, Chamila Liyanage, Pubudu Tharaka Viswakula, Thilini Nagungodage, Randil Pushpananda, Ruvan Weerasinghe

Abstract: This paper proposes an approach on implementing a Text to Speech system for Sinhala language using MaryTTS framework. In this project, a set of rules for mapping text to sound were identified and proceeded with Unit selection mechanism. The datasets used for this study were gathered from newspaper articles and the corresponding sentences were recorded by a professional speaker. User level evaluation was conducted with 20 candidates, where the intelligibility and the naturalness of the developed Sinhala TTS system received an approximate score of 70%. And the overall speech quality is an approximately to 60%.