Abstract:
A text-to-speech conversion engine was developed for Tamil language that could successfully
convert any arbitrary Tamil text into spoken utterance. The back-end of the engine was a sound
database created with 343 phonemes which were chosen as the basic units of Tamil language.
The text-to-speech engine splits the given text into the basic units of Tamil, extracts the correct
phonemes from the database and concatenates the basic unit waveforms in the correct
sequence to produce the required sound waveform. The front-end of the engine is a GUI
interface that allows users to input Tamil text in letters or even numbers. The text can be stored
to be used at a later time. The Tamil font “TSC_Avarangal” was selected as the font to develop
the user interface. The sound editing software “Sound Forge” was used when preparing the
phonemes with correct pitch. This work shows that for languages such as Tamil or Sinhala textto-
speech engines can be successfully developed with the available resources.
