Bilkent University
Department of Computer Engineering

 

Turkish Text to Speech System

 

Baris EKER

MS in Computer Engineering, Turkey

Supervisors: Prof. Dr. H.Altay Guvenir, Asst. Prof. Dr. Ilyas Çiçekli

 

Scientists have been interested in producing human speech artificially for more than two centuries. After the invention of computers, computers are used in order to synthesize speech. By the help of this new technology, Text To Speech (TTS) systems that take a text as input and produce speech as output were started to be created. Some languages like English and French has taken most of the attention and some languages like Turkish has not been taken into consideration.

This thesis presents a TTS system for Turkish that uses diphone concatenation method. It takes a text as input and produces corresponding speech in Turkish. The output can be obtained in one male voice only in that system. Since Turkish is a phonetic language, this system also can be used for other phonetic languages with some minor modifications. If this system is integrated with a pronunciation unit, it can also be used for languages that are not phonetic.

Keywords: Text To Speech, TTS, Turkish, Speech Synthesis, Diphone Concatenation

 

DATE: April 25, 2002, Thursday @ 13:30

PLACE: EA 502