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Text-to-Speech for Low-Resource Languages (Episode 4): One Down, 299 to Go

Friday, September 7, 2018

Posted by Alexander Gutkin, Software Engineer, Google AIThis is the fourth episode in the series of posts reporting on the work we are doing to build text-to-speech (TTS) systems for low resource languages. In the first episode, we described the crowdsourced acoustic data collection effort for Project Unison. In the second episode, we described how we built parametric voices based on that data. In the third episode, we described the compilation of a pronunciation lexicon for a TTS system. In this episode, we describe how to make a single TTS system speak many languages.multiple languagesmultilingualinitial investigationnew modelInternational Phonetic AlphabetExploring the Closely Related Languages of Indonesialanguages of IndonesiaStandard IndonesianJavaneseSundanesephonologies

Joint phoneme inventory of Indonesian, Javanese, and Sundanese in International Phonetic Alphabet notation.

Google TranslateAndroidExpanding to the More Diverse Language Families of South Asiavery differentIndo-AryanDravidianSanskritculture

Descendants of Sanskrit word for “culture” across languages.

TeluguKannadaWest BengaliOdiaGujaratiMarathiphonologyorthographyin our recent paper

Diagram illustrating our multilingual text-to-speech approach. The input text queries are processed by language-specific linguistic front-ends to generate pronunciations in a shared phonemic representation serving as input to the language-agnostic acoustic model. The model then generates audio for the respective queries.

Indian BengaliGujaratiKannadaMalayalamMarathiTamilTeluguUrduNepaliSinhalaHindiBangladeshi BengaliGoogle for IndiaNepaliSinhalaBengaliKhmerJavaneseSundaneseSLTUInterspeech