Afolabi Akinlolu Olarinde

Development of Text to Speech System for Yoruba Language Afolabi Akinlolu Olarinde

Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech, a computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer and can be implemented in software and hardware. A text-to-speech (TTS) system converts normal language text into speech. In the last few years, this technology has been widely available for several languages for different platform ranging from personal computer to smart devices, but for Yoruba language which is being spoken by over 30 million people out of 150 million Nigerian populace have not been fully developed. Therefore, there is need to develop such system. There are several techniques that can be used these include Formant synthesis, Articulatory synthesis, Concatenative synthesis etc. but for this work, concatenating method was used. Concatenative synthesis based on concatenation i.e. stringing together of segments of recorded parts of speech. Yoruba syllables served as the basic units of concatenation and written in C# programming language implemented in . NET Framework, Yoruba syllable database was merged with corresponding recorded Yoruba sound syllable database so that there can be meaningful sound pronunciation