Abstract:
This paper brings together the development of the
first Text-to-Speech (TTS) system for Sinhala using the
Festival framework and practical applications of it.
Construction of a diphone database and
implementation of the natural language processing
modules are described. The paper also presents the
development methodology of direct Sinhala Unicode
text input by rewriting Letter-to-Sound rules in
Festival's context sensitive rule format and the
implementation of Sinhala syllabification algorithm. A
Modified Rhyme Test (MRT) was conducted to
evaluate the intelligibility of the synthesized speech
and yielded a score of 71.5% for the TTS system
described.