Practical Issues in the Development of TTS and SR For The Sinhala Language

Abstract

In this study, discussed some issues that are arising in the development of Text-to-Speech (TTS) and Speech Recognition (SR) systems for the Sinhala language are discussed. There are numerous benefits of TTS and SR to Sinhala community. In the context of Sinhala language, the Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies are in the primary stage in comparison with other languages such as English, French, German, Japanese etc. Since current TTS and SR development environments are far from being language independent, the existing systems cannot be adopted directly to the Sinhala language. This contribution outlines problematic areas that come across in the development of TTS and SR systems for Sinhala language. While discussing those problems, some of the possible solution strategies for both TTS and SR development have been formulated.