Bangla Text to Speech using Festival

This paper describes the development of the first, usable, open source and freely available Bangla Text to Speech (TTS) system for Bangladeshi Bangla using the open source Festival TTS engine. Besides that, this paper also discusses a few practical applications that use this system. This system is developed using diphone concatenation approach in its waveform generation phase. Construction of a diphone database and implementation of the natural language processing modules are described. Natural language processing modules include text processing, tokenizing and grapheme to phoneme (G2P) conversion that were written in Festival's format. Finally, a test was conducted to evaluate the intelligibility of the synthesized speech.