This paper describes the first Text-to-Speech (TTS) system for the Wolaytta language, using speech synthesis architecture of Festival. The TTS is based on diphone concatenative synthesis, applying Residual LPC technique. The conversion process from input text into acoustic waveform is performed in a number of steps consisting of functional components. Procedures and functions for the steps and their components are discussed. Finally, the performance of the system is measured and the quality of synthesized speech is assessed in terms of intelligibility and naturalness. The test results indicate that the majority of the words are recognizable. The overall performance of the system is found to be 78%. When it comes to the intelligibility and naturalness of the synthesized speech, it is measured in MOS scale and the overall intelligibility and naturalness of the system is found to be 3.17 and 2.77 respectively.

Tewodros Abebe is an instructor in Wolaytta Soddo University, Ethiopia. He has experience in teaching, training, and consulting. He completed his graduate studies with a MSc Information Science and BSc Computer Science from Addis Ababa University. His research interests are in the areas of NLP, Morphological Analysis and Machine Translation.

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