Our Focus
We receive many requests from individuals who would like us to build a voice in their language so that they, themselves, can use it. However, because building a new voice is a long and costly task, we need to determine which languages are truly in need, and to make sure that any voice we build will be put to good and widespread use.
We want to hear from user groups, agencies, organizations and government programmes. We want to hear from those ready to support a voice if it were to be built. We want to know the following:
What will your group of users use the voice for? Examples:
Blind screen-readers on phones and computers.
Phone users with age-related problems with vision for reading.
People with dyslexia.
Helping to improve literacy
People who are speech-impaired.
Organizations who want to provide books in audio for people who cannot read.
We also want to know any barriers to the use of a voice, and how those would be overcome. Examples:
Do some people first have to learn how to operate certain accessibility features on their phone or computer?
Do people need devices?
Does the voice need to handle specialized forms of text, other languages?
Armenian
We are talking here of Eastern Armenian, spoken in the Republic of Armenian. We have performed some exploratory work and have an internal prototype which we are using to refine our language processing rules. Before investing more efforts, we are seeking to better understand the source and scope of different potential user groups.
Swahili
We have completed our Setswana voice. After the challenges of its tones, we look forward to tackling the relatively easy Swahili!
Our interest in Swahili stems from reports we hear for a number of sources that there is a need for a TTS in this language.
Again, we want to start seeking partners who can confirm the nature of the need. Stay tuned!
Tajik
Khmer
The Indic Languages
RHVoice developers get many requests from speakers of both northern and southern languages from South Asia. Hindi, Bengali, Nepali, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil and several others. We think that reasonable TTS exist for some of those languages, but not on all platforms: Some languages may be available on Windows, but not on Android. And vice versa. Price is also an issue.
Amharic
According to Wikipedia, spoken by 67 million people mostly in Ethiopia, as a first or second language. We are told that there is no good, usable TTS voice.
Amharic is a a member of the Semitic language family. But, unlike Arabic and Hebrew it is fairly phonemic with all vowels being written in the text. (“Phonemic” might be translated as “What You See Is What You Hear”.)
The language is mostly phonemic, but gives us some problems because of gemination where two words are pronounced with different consonant emphasis, have different meanings, but are written the same way. Such words are called “homographs” and the human reader knows their meaning from context and so can pronounce them correctly. Not possible with TTS. We have homographs in English like “read” (“I read the book yesterday, and tomorrow I will read it again”). They are rare in English, and TTS users get use to the wrong one being spoken. But if a language has a lot of them, then we begin to worry that the TTS will get too many wrong, and become confusing and tiring.
In the following video we drop you into a short lecture on Amharic, where there are some interesting consonants for the English speaker to consider, followed by that gemination issue again.