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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

We present progress towards automated Lecture Transcription (LT) in resource scarce environments. Our development has focused on the transcription of lectures in Afrikaans from two faculties at North-West University. A ...

We describe the integration of several tools to enable the end-to-end development of an Automatic Speech Recognition system in a typical under-resourced language. Google App Engine is employed as the core environment for ...

This paper introduces a model of affect to improve prosody in text-to-speech synthesis. It operates on the discourse level of text to predict the underlying linguistic factors that contribute towards emotional appraisal, ...

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 ...

Smartphones provide an efficient means for the collection of speech data; however, the quality of the corpora created in this fashion is not predictable. We describe an approach that allows us to post-process and rank ...