Hindi / Marathi Text-To-Speech freeware program released.
Vachak - the Hindi Text-To-Speech program for Windows system is available for quite some time. There was none for Linux System till now. The gap has been bridged by a team of Janabhaaratii, the Language Computing Group C-DAC, Mumbai. Janabhaaratii has recently released text-to-speech freeware program for Hindi and Marathi.
In fact, this Hindi/Marathi text to speech program is an extension of Festival, the text to speech program for Linux system. It means, you need to install Festival first to install and use this Hindi text to speech program. Festival is a cross-platform speech-synthesis engine that can be used in any platform like Windows, Linux, Mac, BSD, sun-Spark etc.
How to install program like festival in Linux? Read this link.
Download Hindi Festival Text-to-speech from here
Download Marathi Festival Text-to-speech from here
Installing these packs are easy. Simply unpack these in any directory, and simply run installation script - install.sh .
Using Festival to read out Hindi/Marathi text may look tedious if you have not installed any front end GUI for festival. Running Festival to read Hindi/Marathi through commands involves following three steps:
1 Start festival on terminal
2 At Festival command prompt, give command to use Hindi speech engine.
3 Give command to use which particular Hindi text file
Command Syntex will be like this:
$ festival
festival> (voice_hindi_NSK_diphone)
festival> (tts "/home/sample.txt" nil)
Here, /home/sample.txt is the path of text file you want to read-out by the program.
While testing this program, it appears that it has more mechanical sound than Vachak, the Windows counterpart. If there are not enough spaces or hyphenation signs, then it reads the text in flat, regular speed that appears a little awful to listeners, and at times you may find difficult to understand the speech. It skips some words that it can't recognize. Still, since it is in its Alpha version, it looks promising enough to grow in a full fledged, feature rich Hindi Text-to-speech program.
I tried a sample Hindi text, the result of which you can listen by downloading or streaming this MP3 file (1MB).
Tag hindi,marathi,text,speech
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6 comments:
It is nice to know that Hindi is now becoming popular on net and the use of our language is increasing day by day. My best wishes to all of these organizations who are constatntly working towards the technology development of our language. I would also like to mention about these folks who are doing some superb work: Bliss Text To Speech for the development of Hindi Text To Speech System :
www.blissit.org/hinditts.htm
These guys are providing the Hindi TTS from a long time (Maybe way before the Vaachak era). The voice quality of their system is excellent and it is highly intelligible.
This organization is basically a research organization and it hardly appears in commercial arena. I have heard the news that very soon they are going to provide their Hindi TTS system in a very low price. Hmmm something to watch !!
Hi,
Yes, thanks, I had listened their demo and they are impressive. I think they must release limited demo version of software so that world could know more about this beautiful software.
Pls visit: http://nrcfosshelpline.in/iiithyd/
Please visit: http://nrcfosshelpline.in/iiithyd/
I am looking for Software to convert Marathi "Speech to Text".
Can Anyone help???
Mail me on rakeshbudhe@rediffmail.com.
Thanks in advance
Hi guys, I want to know how to install this software in windows platform. Please help me .
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