Implementation of Concatenation Technique for Low Resource Text-To-Speech System Based on Marathi Talking Calculator

Abstract

The indulgent acquaintance of mathematical basic concepts creates the pavement for numerous opportunities in life for every individual, including visually impaired people. The use of assertive technology for the disabled section of the society makes them more independent and avoid barriers in the field of education and employment. This research is focused to design an Android-based application i.e. talking Calculator for low resource based Marathi native language. The novelty of this work is to develop both, the application and the Marathi number corpus. Marathi is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by approximately 6.99 million speakers in India, which is the third widely spoken language after Bengali and Telugu but as they lack in linguistic resources, e.g. grammars, POS taggers, corpora, it falls into the category of low resource languages. The front end part of the application depicts the screen of a basic calculator with numerals displayed in Marathi. During runtime, each number is spoken as the specific key is pressed. It also speaks out the operation which is intended to be performed. The concatenation synthesis technique is applied to speak out the value of decimal places in the output number. The result is spoken out with proper place value of a digit in Marathi. The performance of the system is measured to the accuracy rate of 95.5%. The average run time complexity of the application is also calculated which is noted down to 2.64 sec. The feedback and review of the application is also taken from real end-user i.e. blind people.