Bangla-English Bilingual Text to Speech Synthesis (TTS) System in ICT Service

It is a statistical parametric synthesizer built in HTS framework. It is a bi-lingual TTS in which the parser of the synthesizer recognizes the encoding of the input text and produces synthesized voice accordingly. As the text provided by the user is a mixture of both Bengali (mainly the crop name) and English (chemical name), the TTS can handle both the text gracefully. The TTS is used in ‘Matir Katha’ app, an ambitious ICT based service initiated by Govt. of West Bengal for providing experts’ advice to farmers at the grass root level.