Research Article

Text to Speech System for Punjabi

Using Festival Framework
Sukhpreet Kaur Gill1

Abstract
Text to speech Generation (TTS) is the process of converting the raw text into the speech output.
This article represents the development of Punjabi voice using Festvox tool and the Festival is used
as engine to run that developed voice. The statistical parametric method of waveform generation is
used. The phoneme is chosen as basic unit for speech synthesis. The corpus for Punjabi language is
collected from newspaper and news channels. The recording is done in noise free environment.

Keywords: Festvox, Festival, Statistical parametric method

Introduction
The Text to speech system (TTS) is system which takes input in the form of raw text data and converts it into the
synthesized voiced output. The TTS is part of speech synthesis process. There are different types of speech synthesis
systems which are used to synthesize the voice like MBROLA, FESTIVAL and FLITE.4 But, Festival is one of best text to
speech synthesis Framework.1 The Festival is act as engine to run the voice. The festvox act as backend part through
which the actual development also makes use of voice is done as shown in Fig. 1. Festvox as backend part to develop
the new voice. Festival Framework has multilingual support. Festival is implemented in two languages C++ and SIOD.
In Festvox currently seven Indic languages was developed.1

Figure 1.Role of Festvox in Voice Development

The basic methodology is used by all frameworks for development of synthesized speech outputs. The steps involve in
the speech generation are: Text processing, Linguistic processing and waveform generation as outlined in Fig. 2.
1
Assistant Professor, GNA University, Phagwara, Punjab, India.
E-mail Id: gillsukhi92@mail.com
Orcid Id: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6247-7571
How to cite this article: Gill SK. Text to Speech System for Punjabi Using Festival Framework. J Adv Res Appl Arti Intel Neural
Netw 2017; 4(1&2): 36-40.

© ADR Journals 2017. All Rights Reserved.

J. Adv. Res. Appl. Arti. Intel. Neural Netw. 2017; 4(1&2)
Figure 2.Text to Speech System
This article focuses on the building of Punjabi voice
using Festvox. The Indian Language script was
developed from Brahmis script.7 Punjabi Language is
spoken by the 104 million people in the India. In this
article the Statistical Parametric Synthesis method of
Festvox is used to develop the voice. The phoneme is
chosen as basic unit for the generation of synthesized
voice. The grapheme to phoneme synthesizer is used
because of lack of resources for Indian languages. This
technique provides support for phonetics, but
construction of explicit lexicon is not required.1
Synthesis methods offers by Festvox are: unit selection,
limited Domain and diphone method. In the unit
selection method synthesized speech quality depend
upon the quality of collected corpus. The deep
knowledge is required for complete processing. In
Statistical parametric synthesized technique less corpus
is needed and little knowledge is required to develop
the TTS system. The basic Methodology of Statistical
Parametric method includes the extraction of feature
parameters of frequency contour and Mel Cepstral
coefficients. These parameters are extracted from
labelled data. In this method the maximum likelihood
criteria for decision making is used.2 This is applied at
the time when the decision is taken to select the
accurate parametric features to generate the cluster
tree and duration model. The evaluation of duration
Models is done using root mean square error and co-
relates coefficient.
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Gill SK
Literature Survey
Indic languages are supported by the Festival speech
synthesis system which is an open source. It makes use
of the three vital modules i.e. text processing, prosodic
processing and the synthesis of waveform[1]In past
decades, many researchers has compared the quality of
speech produced by festival using different units of
speech (i.e. syllable, phoneme etc.) and techniques for
producing the waveform. For producing waveform
mainly, the Unit selection and diphones are used by
researchers. The speech synthesized using Open-
Domain Unit Selection makes use of minimal user
experience and knowledge for speech synthesis [10].
Various fundamental units like syllable or phonemes are
tested in Unit Selection waveform synthesis. Using
syllable as the fundamental unit, a TTS system is
generated for the Bengali language.8 But, phoneme is
used for building a Malayalam TTS system [5]. For
reconstructing wave signal from the extracted
parameters, Statistical Parametric Synthesis is one of
the easiest methods.2 The size of the database decides
the quality of speech produced in case of Unit Selection
synthesis. Moreover, for generating speech using this
technique specialization is required and it’s also
expensive. The Festival system and Festvox new
versions are updated to support CLUSTERGEN voices.
These are released in new version beta 1.96 of Festival.
Unit selection technique is applied on the parameters
extracted using the CLUSTERGEN method, in hybrid
Gill SK et al.
technique. Results verified that this hybrid technique is
better than the statistical parametric method and Cl
units.
In this article, CLUSTERGEN technique along with festival
framework is used to produce Punjabi language speech.
Analysis of phonemes of Punjabi shows that Punjabi
phonemes can be categorized in two parts i.e. non-
nasalized valid phonemes (total and nasalized valid
phonemes (total 324).6,7
Figure 3.Methodology for Speech Generation
Collection and Recording of Speech
For the development of Punjabi language the speech
corpus of about 80 minute was recorded. The recorded
data is used to develop the Punjabi synthesized voice.
The corpus was collected in the form of sentences. The
corresponding voice was recorded in the noiseless
studio. For the acceptance in Festvox, the voice is
normalized to convert it into 16 kHz format. The data is
divided randomly into training data (90% of total
segments) and test data (10% of total segments).5 The
recorded corpus is recorded by seven different female
recorders and one best female recorder voice was
selected. For the accurate automatic labelling the
starting and end silences was pruned. The middle
silence was also pruned in the utterances.
Selection of basic Unit for Synthesis
The beginning of development of voice is done by
selecting basic unit for synthesis. There are various units
that have been used in the researches like phones,
diphone and syllables.2 But, in this article we choose the
J. Adv. Res. Appl. Arti. Intel. Neural Netw. 2017; 4(1&2)
Experimental Work
The corpus for the Punjabi language is collected from
different Punjabi newspapers and new channels. The
corpus selection is done in such way that it should cover
the possible Punjabi ordinals. Due to lack of resources
Grapheme based synthesizer is used. The basic modules
in festvox include the text normalization,
prosody/linguistic analysis and waveform re-synthesis as
shown in Fig. 3.
phoneme as basic unit for synthesis. The quality of this
speech output is although not accurate and moreover
leads to discontinuities at joining point. But it is the
smallest unit and therefore requires the less amount of
speech corpus. The storage space needed for speech
corpus is large in case of syllable basic unit. So,
phoneme is chosen as basic unit. Another reason is that,
in this article grapheme based synthesizer is used.
Labelling and Model Development
The labelling is the important part in every speech
synthesis Framework. The Festival supports the
automatic labelling using EHMM labeller. But,
sometimes it leads to wrong results. So, the manual
labelling is also performed. The labelling is done to make
the each phone unit in the corpus and assigning the
sound to each phoneme unit. The manual labelling is
hard task but leads to accurate results. The Wave surfer
tool is used for the manual labelling of the speech
corpus. The Fig. 4 shows the manual labelling of speech
corpus using the Wave surfer tool.
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J. Adv. Res. Appl. Arti. Intel. Neural Netw. 2017; 4(1&2) Gill SK

Figure 4.The Marking for Phonemes in the Word “ਬ + +ਗ਼”

The next step is the extraction of features from the
labelled data. These extracted features are then
selected on the basis of decision theory of maximum
likelihood criteria to develop the cluster trees and
duration model. The CART is used to develop the cluster
trees. In statistical parametric synthesis method only
single decision tree is developed. The decision tree has
binary query for any feature at each node in the
developed tree. Based on training data, the leaves of the
tree contain the best predicted value.
Waveform Synthesis
When user inputted text then re-construction of
waveform is performed. In which Festvox developed
voice is selected by Festival to run the voice according to
the inputted text. In this sounds are derived by the
parser and the features are extracted by linguistic part.
In the Statistical Parametric technique, the developed
model features are mapped with inputted text features
and at end all these are joined to develop the waveform
as shown in Fig. 5. The basis constraints behind the
selection of speech units are:
 The best match unit for the target unit is selected.
 The selected should be such that they must join
smoothly when concatenation is done to
reconstruct the waveform.

Figure 5.Waveform Re-synthesis

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Gill SK et al.
Conclusion
Development of Punjabi voice using Festvox is
presented in this article. The Grapheme based speech
generation which uses statistical parametric approach is
used which was easy to implement. The speech corpus
of 80 minute recording is used to cover possible valid
phonemes. The recording in noiseless environment is
done and complete analysis of the Punjabi phonemes is
done to build language rules. Also, at each module all
issue are taken into consideration that can affect the
quality of output voice and mainly focused on text
processing and manual labelling which is main base to
synthesize the voice. The output waveform for the given
input text using Statistical voice model is natural in
sounding and very smooth. For phoneme as basic unit
the less storage space for corpus is required.
References
1. Black AW, Lenzo K. Building voices in the festival
speech synthesis system. Festvox 2.7 Edition,
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2. Black AW. CLUSTERGEN: A statistical parametric
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