Diphone Speech Synthesis System for Arabic Using MARY TTS

Concatenative speech synthesis systems generate speech by concatenating small prerecorded speech units which are stored in the speech unit inventory. The most commonly used type of these units is the diphone which is a unit that starts at the middle of one phone and extends to the middle of the following one. Diphones have the advantage of modeling coarticulation by including the transition to the next phone inside the diphone itself. In this paper, a diphone speech synthesis system for the Arabic language using MARY TTS has been developed and evaluated by two types of tests which are the Diagnostic Rhyme Test (DRT) that measures the intelligibility of the synthesized speech and the Categorical Estimation (CE) test that measures the overall quality of the synthesized speech. The results of these tests are illustrated in the experiments and results section.