Text-to-Speech Mobile Application for Maithili Language

Abstract

This paper discusses development of Text-to-Speech (TTS) mobile application for Maithili Language.
Maithili is one of the twenty-two languages included in the Eighth Schedule to the Constitution of India. This TTS mobile
application is an Android based application which is able to convert Maithili text to its correspondence speech form.
This application is developed on Android studio 3.0. This application supports Devanagari script as inputting the text.
The nature of Maithili language is syllabic similar to other Indo-Aryan languages so syllable is taken as the basic unit
for concatenative method. For enhancing the naturalness of the synthesized voice, user can control the pitch and speed
using Seek Bar at the time of voice generation. Subjective and Objective evaluation conducted by 100 native speakers. A
questionnaire has been created to evaluate the Maithili text-to-speech system. Naturalness test, Comprehensibility test,
Productivity test conducted for testing the application and summary of results are good. For this evaluation Mean
Opinion Score (MOS) is used. This is the first TTS mobile application for Maithili Language.