CHULA TTS: A Modularized Text-To-Speech Framework

Spoken and written languages evolve constantly through their everyday usages. Combining with practical expectation for automatically generating synthetic speech suitable for various domains of context, such a reason makes Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems of living languages require characteristics that allow extensible handlers for new language phenomena or customized to the nature of the domains in which TTS systems are deployed. ChulaTTS was designed and implemented with a modularized concept. Its framework lets components of typical TTS systems work together and their combinations are customized using simple human-readable configurations. Under .NET development framework, new text processing and signal synthesis components can be built while existing components can simply be wrapped in .NET dynamic-link libraries exposing expected methods governed by a predefined programming interface. A case of ChulaTTS implementation and sample applications were also discussed in this paper.