Development overview of TTS-MK speech synthesizer for Macedonian language, and its application

Abstract

This paper shows the current results of development of TTS-MK – a speech synthesizer for Macedonian language. The basic principles for projecting and building of speech synthesizer for Macedonian language, based on concatenation of speech segments, are shown. Every language has its respective and specific speech norms and characteristics that should be observed during the speech synthesis. The Macedonian language is phonetic; hence the normative pronunciation does not contain great difficulty, except in some special cases that should be taken into consideration. The presentation also focuses on the accent in the Macedonian language, which is dynamic and positioned on the third syllable. The rules and regulations for the accent positioning in the Macedonian language can be easily derived, with some deviations that should be resolved. There are two versions of the system based on different segments corpora. Both of them are presented, as well as their application.