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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Speech technologies have matured over the past few decades and have made significant impacts in a variety of fields, from assistive technologies to personal assistants. However, speech system development is a resource ...