| Budget Amount *help |
¥5,330,000 (Direct Cost: ¥4,100,000、Indirect Cost: ¥1,230,000)
Fiscal Year 2013: ¥1,040,000 (Direct Cost: ¥800,000、Indirect Cost: ¥240,000)
Fiscal Year 2012: ¥1,170,000 (Direct Cost: ¥900,000、Indirect Cost: ¥270,000)
Fiscal Year 2011: ¥3,120,000 (Direct Cost: ¥2,400,000、Indirect Cost: ¥720,000)
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| Research Abstract |
This study pursued an economical method to create a text-to-speech (TTS) software for a new language using an existing voice synthesizer. The new sound conversion rules were created with manually edited letter-to-sound rules by native speakers for most frequently used words. In order to evaluate the method, Japanese and Nepali TTS systems were created using Hindi TTS that was commercially available. The created Nepali TTS produced well recognized speech with 60-80 percent accuracy. Meanwhile the created Japanese TTS produced speech that was recognized with less than 30 percent accuracy. It was concluded that the method of this study could be usable for a language pair where the original and target minority language are phonetically and linguistically close. However there would still be challenges about language-specific issues, such as prosodic modeling, unknown words pronunciation, and grammatical analysis.
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