Implementation of Turkish Text-to-Speech Synthesis on a Voice Synthesizer Card with Prosodic Features

Abstract

This study is on hardware implementation of the Turkish text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis with a voice synthesizer card. Here, a fully functional TTS system, capable of synthesizing every Turkish text, including abbreviations, numbers, etc. is designed and implemented. The system is additionally enriched by applying some prosodic attributes for more intelligible and natural speech production. A set of rules required for proper pronunciation and stress patterns are precisely defined in a lexicon utilized for synthesizing Turkish speech. Performance of the developed system is assessed by the Mean Opinion Score (MOS) test. An average score of 3.8 out of 5 is achieved. It indicates that the proposed synthesizer can be successfully integrated to many practical Turkish TTS applications.