Text to Speech-in Real Time

Another futuristic and ambitious project by IIIT Hyderabad comes from the

Language Technologies Research Centre (LTRC). While language processing dissects

the minute nuances of language structure, and attempts to make the machine as

intelligent or more than what a human being is able to comprehend and convert

it, LTRC takes it a step further. It finds applications to use both visual and

spoken language for practical use, especially in a rural environment. “Our

vision is to develop the world's best text-to-speech interface for Indian

languages. While everyone is focusing their attention on speech recognition, our

endeavor is to integrate speech and text interchangeably for Indian languages”,

explained Kishore Prahlad, Head of the LTRC Speech lab. The first step towards

this vision is currently available in the form of a demo at http://speech.

iiit.ac.in /~speech/demos.html. The first tool here is a demo of a speech

application that allows you to type in Hindi or Telugu words, phrases and

sentences (using English alphabets) to get a real time output of the same in

Hindi or Telugu font respectively. On selecting the 'synthesize' option, a WAV

sound file 'speaks' out the sentence you have typed. The second demo is that of

a Language Transliteration Tool, which



allows you to type a sentence in English and view the same in any one of the
other nine language scripts (Hindi, Telugu, Malayalam, Bengali, Tamil, Assamese,

Kannada, Marathi and Sanskrit).

Above is the screenshot of the software developed at LTRC

LTRC students foresee a socio economic usage of these applications. An ideal

example would be a scenario where villages and local governments can be

forewarned about a natural calamity with the devastation rate of something like

the Tsunami in their own regional languages. Before embarking into other

languages, the students plan to make a stable language system in Telugu and

practice for a while on their home ground.

Rajeev Sangal Professor, IIIT Hyderabad