Text Reader for Konkani Language

Text to Speech conversion and Speech Synthesis are two major areas in which lot of research work is currently carried out. In these areas the product design are majorly useful to develop Human Computer Interfaces. In the present era of Human Computer Interaction the visually impaired community in India are deprived of technologies that could help them interact with the sighted world, develop their educational infrastructure and consequently join the mainstream life through employment opportunities. This can be achieved by developing an audio interface using a text to speech system as the basic backbone. Due to this the products are becoming major tool to inculcate the IT learning in rural part of India. We have emphasized on an Indian Language Speech (Konkani) Interface to be used in different applications that would empower the visually impaired to communicate.

The main component of a text to speech processing system is speech synthesis. Speech synthesis is a process in which input text is analysed, understood and then rendered into audible speech (Text To Speech (TTS) Conversion). It is the text processing unit that accepts an arbitrary text and produces appropriate sequence of phonemic units. These phonemic units are realized by a speech generation component either by synthesis from parameters or by selection of a unit from a large speech corpus.

A number of tools and resources are developed for text to speech processing.

A lot of research is carried out for development of TTS systems for Indian Languages. There are a few text to speech system designed for Indian languages like Dhvani, Vani, etc which are capable of generating intelligible speech for many Indian languages (such as hindi, tamil, urdu etc.) excluding Konkani.

This paper contains survey of the tool eSpeak, used for its implementation. The paper presented describes the current state of Text to Speech Conversion and Speech Synthesis techniques and issues regarding Konkani language.