Subjective Testing of Urdu Text-to-Speech (TTS) System

Text-to-speech (TTS) systems for many widely spoken languages have been developed and evolved over the last few decades. Such systems are being used in many different fields. Since these TTS systems have differences in the perceived sound quality, many speech quality test methods have been proposed to compare and evaluate their performance. Test materials for these tests, however, are language specific and hence cannot be used for TTS systems developed for other languages such as Urdu. In this work, we have presented a speech quality test material specially designed for Urdu TTS systems. The proposed test is conducted using the perception of both blind and non-blind native speakers to evaluate naturalness as well as phoneme, word and sentencelevel intelligibility of recently developed Urdu TTS system. Furthermore, a qualitative comparison is performed between two most popular methods for building TTS systems.