An implementation of an isiZulu text to speech system

摘要

IsiZulu language is the most spoken home language in South Africa. Like many other aspects of life in the third world, it lags in its technology interaction. This paper discusses the implementation of an isiZulu concatenative text to speech (TTS) system. There are several kinds of concatenative TTS systems, ranging from the natural sounding full word systems to more flexible phone based general-purpose systems that unfortunately sound like a computer. In this paper, we discuss an implementation of a general-purpose diphone based isiZulu TTS system.