Text-to-Speech Synthesis: Literature Review with an Emphasis on Malayalam Language

Abstract

Text-to-Speech Synthesis (TTS) is an active area of research to generate synthetic speech from underlying text. The identified syllables are uttered with proper duration and prosody characteristics to emulate natural speech. It falls under the category of Natural Language Processing (NLP), which aims to bridge the gap in communication between human and machine. So far as Western languages like English are concerned, the research to produce intelligent and natural synthetic speech has advanced considerably. But in a multilingual state like India, many regional languages viz. Malayalam is underexplored when it comes to NLP. In this article, we try to amalgamate the major research works performed in the area of TTS in English and the prominent Indian languages, with a special emphasis on the South Indian language, Malayalam. This review intends to provide right direction to the research activities in the language, in the area of TTS.