Kathak
is the first open source true text to speech synthesis
system for Bengali. Bengali is the 5 th widely speaking
language of the world but large number of people is
still don’t have the chance to access the digital information.
Kathak will play a role to give chance to those people
for accesing the digital world and thus will help to
avoid the digital divide for a large number of people.
We started developing
Bengali text to speech synthesis system as our graduation
thesis at AIUB. We submitted the final thesis paper
on “Implementation of Bengali Text to Speech Synthesis
System”. We have used Festvox as development framework
and the module will work with the Festival speech synthesis
engine.
Sample Voice
We will add the sample voice soon.
Join BTTS development team
We will appreciate the
developers/students if they join BTTS development team
because there is lots of issue still left to address
to improve the quality of the synthesis and make it
more intelligible. For helping the development of BTTS
you don’t need to be a programmer. Only your interest
is enough for that. Click here to see where you can
contribute for the development of BTTS.
Kathak
Unicode Word Processor for Bangla
You can use Kathak UI
as an independent Word processor for Bangla which works
equally in both Linux and Windows. We have used Munir
Key board layout as default keyboard mapping but you
can create customized key board mappings.
Find out more>>
Kathak
Source Release
We have released the
source for Kathak primarily and the voice module for
festival still is very much unstable for public release
and the voice quality need to be improved more.Hopefully
we will release the Bengali Voice module within few
weeks. How to use the source files for developing your
own voice for Bangla has been discussed in detail in
the documentation.
Kathak short
introduction
Development Environment:
Redhat Linux 9.0 , Mandrake 10.0
Programming Language : Scheme (a dialect for LISP) ,
Java (UI)
Framework: Festival , Festvox (http://festvox.org).
Tools:EMU Speech
Tools, Sound Forge 6.0
Operating Systems:Linux, Windows 32 (to be added later)
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