[mary-users] Amharic speech synthesis

[Marc Schroeder]

Dear Bereket Kasaye,

thanks for your email. Apologies for copying it to the mary-users list,
but the issue is related to other people's questions as well.

Actually, your question has two parts:

1. how to build a tts system for Amharic;

2. how to link HMM training to MARY TTS.

Regarding 1, the creation of new languages with MARY is obviously
becoming an interesting topic for more and more people. Ideally we
should create a toolkit for this, allowing for the creation of a minimal
system with limited effort. But that will not happen overnight.

In the meantime, you could look at the content of
http://mary.opendfki.de/browser/trunk/java/de/dfki/lt/mary/modules/tib
to see what was done in a students' project to create a minimalistic
Tibetan speech synthesiser. Instead of the rule-based ContourGenerator
and KlattDurationModeller, you could use subclasses of
http://mary.opendfki.de/browser/trunk/java/de/dfki/lt/mary/modules/CARTDurationModeller.java 

and
http://mary.opendfki.de/browser/trunk/java/de/dfki/lt/mary/modules/CARTF0Modeller.java
as the current unit selection voices do, or rely on hmm-based components.

Regarding 2, we have a version of that for German and English, but need
to clean it up a bit before publishing it.


Hope that helps at least a bit, best regards,
Marc (off for Christmas holidays now...! :-)


bereket kasaye schrieb:
> Dear Marc Schroder, 
> 
>  First of all I will like to express my appreciation for you that you
>  developed a text to speech synthesis system (MARY) and make it available
>  for speech researchers. 
> 
>  My name is Bereket Kasaye and I am from Ethiopia. I am a master's student at Addis Ababa University, department of computer science.
>  Currently I am doing my thesis on speech synthesis for local language
>  "Amharic" using Hidden Markov Model. Now I need to know how I can train the Amharic language and use Mary. 
>   
>  I want your help as to how I can use Mary and HTS engine for the local language. If you have
>  materials that I should read before I proceed, please send me.  
> 
> 
> Thank you very much!
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Looking for last minute shopping deals? Find them fast with Yahoo! 
> Search. 
> <http://us.rd.yahoo.com/evt=51734/*http://tools.search.yahoo.com/newsearch/category.php?category=shopping> 
> 

-- 
Dr. Marc Schröder, Senior Researcher
DFKI GmbH, Campus D3_2, Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3, D-66123 Saarbrücken, Germany
http://www.dfki.de/~schroed
--
official DFKI coordinates:
Deutsches Forschungszentrum fuer Kuenstliche Intelligenz GmbH
Trippstadter Strasse 122, D-67663 Kaiserslautern, Germany
Geschaeftsfuehrung:
Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Wolfgang Wahlster (Vorsitzender)
Dr. Walter Olthoff
Vorsitzender des Aufsichtsrats: Prof. Dr. h.c. Hans A. Aukes
Amtsgericht Kaiserslautern, HRB 2313