The aim of the project is to transfer text-to-speech (TtS) technology and to adapt it to the Bulgarian language for developing a speech synthesis engine for Bulgarian. An important by-product will be the collection and processing of Bulgarian corpora (text and spoken corpora). An additional goal of the project will be to exploit the TtS engine for speech-enhancing a cultural web portal that will be developed (in the context of an other project), making it more accessible to visually impaired people. Text-to-speech is widely considered as a key enabling technology worldwide. Language technology tools are now an indispensable part in various research and development areas but also in educational technology. The potential application areas are numerous and span from automated personal aids, to automated announcement systems, call centers, telephone services and so on. However, one of the most important application areas is the development of assistive tools and services for disabled people. The Institute for Language and Speech Processing (ILSP) that is managing the project, has a widely recognized experience in the design of language technology solutions. ILSP has been a pioneer in text-to-speech for Greek language, having developed 3 generations of TtS engines up to date, based on different methodologies. ILSP’s current TtS engine offers a synthetic voice of very high intelligibility and quality.
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