Natural Speech Synthesizer for Blind Persons Using Hybrid Approach

The major challenges faced by the researchers in speech synthesis are intelligibility and naturalness. Intelligibility means easily understandable and naturalness means the quality of speech being very near to human speech. Due to dynamic nature of human speech it is very difficult to mimic it, as the same content of speech in different situations is having different prosodic parameters. This paper discusses an approach to develop a natural sounding speech synthesizer. The developed Text To Speech system was tested on blind persons using subjective listening test. Test was performed using mean average score (MOS) and it was done on ten blind persons of age group varies from 14 years to 42 years. Five parameters naturalness, intelligibility, usability, localization awareness, expressions were considered for analysis of the speech synthesizer. As a result, good MOS was received for naturalness and usability, fair MOS for intelligibility and localization.