A complete intonation model based on quantitative target approximation is described for Yorùbá text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis. This model is evaluated analytically and perceptually and compared to a fundamental frequency ...

The purpose of this paper is to address the challenges and describe step-by-step solutions faced when developing an automatic speech recognition system in multilingual societies. We give a brief statistical analysis of the ...

Access to information and communication is one of the most important needs in any population group. It is generally challenging for people in the developing world to access information because the tools and the technologies ...

We present methods for modelling and synthesising fundamental frequency (F0) contours suitable for application in text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis of Yorùbá (an African tone language). These methods are discussed and compared ...

Providing good medical care in low-resourced areas is a challenge faced by many low and middle income countries. Continuously improving mobile communication infrastructure in these areas is however providing the opportunity ...

Research using voice-based services as a technology platform for providing information access and services within developing world regions has shown much promise. The results for design and deployment of such voice-based ...

This paper addresses the feasibility of using the telephone as a tool for information access in the technology challenged and illiterate communities of Southern Africa. We did two case studies of disparate Interactive Voice ...

We investigate the acoustic realisation of tone in short continuous utterances in Yorùbá. Fundamental frequency (F0) contours are extracted for automatically aligned syllables from a speech corpus of 33 speakers collected ...

We report on the development of speech-recognition systems that are able to perform accurate recognition on mediumvocabulary tasks (i.e. tasks that require distinctions between approximately 200 different terms). We are ...

We investigate the effectiveness with which the accuracy of a prompted speech corpus can be validated when minimal additional speech resources are available, and specifically when a language model in the target language ...