Abstract
Speech synthesis plays a pivotal role nowadays. It can be found in various daily applications such as in mobile phones, navigation systems, languages learning software and so on. In this study, a Malay language speech synthesizer was designed using hidden Markov model to improve the performance of current Malay speech synthesizer and also extend Malay speech technology. Statistical parametric method was utilized in this study. The database was constructed to be balanced with all the phonetic sample appeared in Malay language. The results were rated by 48 listeners and obtained a moderate high rating ranging from 3.79 to 4.23 out of 5. The computed Word Error Rate is 7.1%. The total file size is less than 2 Megabytes which means it is suitable to be embedded into daily application. In conclusion, a Malay language speech synthesizer was designed using statistical parametric method with hidden Markov model. The output speech was verified to be good in quality. The file size is small indicates the feasibility to be used in embedded system.
Highlights
Speech is the medium of communication between people
Listeners were asked to rate the clarity of synthetic speech using a 5-point scale from 1 (Totally not clear) to 5 (Very clear)
Listeners were asked to transcribe the synthetic speech into text and Word Error Rate (WER) was computed to mark the intelligibility level
Summary
Speech is the medium of communication between people. The goal of speech synthesis is to generate speeches from text using computer (Rashad et al, 2010). There is a difference between any talking machine and speech synthesizer. Speech synthesis technique is importantin our daily life It is incorporated in various systems such as car navigation, screen reader, language learning, telecommunication and so on. Malay language or Bahasa Melayu is the official language in Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei. This language possesses agglutinative characteristic where the words in Malay language are formed by joining syllables. Malay was defined as a Type III language by linguists; consist of Consonant-Vowel (CV) and Consonant-Vowel-Consonant (CVC). These combinations are most commonly found in every Malay primary word (Teoh, 1994)
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