Louder Pages is pleased to announce user trials of our new language: Armenian.
On International Day of the Blind we have released “Arpi” on the RHVoice Google Play Store App so that visually impaired Android users can benefit from a natural Armenian TTS, and provide feedback and requests for improvement. The RHVoice App provides TTS voices for several languages and those now include Armenian. After feedback from blind users, we hope to improve the voice further, and to release a version for use on Microsoft Windows computers.
The technical challenges faced in building an Armenian text-to-speech system come mostly from its unwritten vowel sounds. This required the development of algorithms for predicting those vowels, together with the compilation of some irregular word “roots”. There is also the challenge of syllable stress which, in Armenian, is made using relative pitch changes. We want to improve this stress synthesis in further versions of Arpi and perhaps in other Armenian voices..
We have been working on test Armenian voices privately for some time, but have recently benefited from the help of White Cane NGO in Armenia.
White Cane provides training to visually impaired Armenians in how to operate smartphones and computers, using both screen-reader software and text-to-speech voices. To date, there has been only one Armenian voice available. That voice uses rather old technology and lacks naturalness and accuracy.
Ms. Zuzan Khuboyan made audio recordings of text which we designed. The text and the recordings were given to our Armenian language transcription and machine learning process. After a number of refinements we have the current version of Arpi.