Hello,

I was playing around with the Irish text to speech synthesizer at:

http://www.abair.tcd.ie/index.php?page=synthesis&lang=gle

and I was wondering about the quality of the speech being created? I understand that the voice was based off of a female from Gweedore, but I am wondering if the quality is good enough to use as an effective tool for learning pronunciation of new words?

I have now seen many impressive French/German/Spanish text to speech synthesizers, but Irish seems to be a late bloomer in this area of technology, or am I incorrect here?

I know that this technology is developing quickly, but is this synthesizer up to par?

Would the more advanced speakers, or native speakers recommend using this site? Or would it be a mistake to use this to listen to new words and phrases being spoken. Since there are no Irish speakers in the area, and Ireland is a little out of my range at the moment, things like this are all I have at my disposal.

It depends on the words. The synthesizer is corpus based, i.e. they recorded a lot of real words from a native speaker, and broke them up into individual sounds. But if the word you type in is not in the corpus, then the tool interpolates based on spelling, and that can give some rough edges.

Ah...that explains why sometimes her voice is very clear and sometimes it sounds like an answering machine.

Does anyone know if there is work being done to improve it? Like I said in my first post, some of the other languages, especially French, had very clear and down right impressive sythesizers.

I think that a high quality synthesizer would be a very powerful tool for self-learners like myself. It would take a lot of the fear and guessing out of the learning process.

Thank you Aonghus for taking the time to answer my post.

It's a work in progress.

Have a look at the FAQ

http://www.abair.tcd.ie/?page=faq&lang=eng

Tá sé seo an suimiúil. This is very interesting.

An dtabharfá seoladh an French Synthesizer dom le do thoil? Would you be kind enough to give us / me the address of the French Synthesizer please.

Bím ag iarraidh an Fhraincis a fhoghlaim ó thráth go chéile. I try to learn French occasionally.

an-suimiúil / ana-shuimiúil

Hello Taidhgin,

The one that I was speaking of was found at:

http://www.research.att.com/~ttsweb/tts/demo.php

Now don't get me wrong. There are times when you can tell it is a machine, but it is a lot better than the Irish one.

Just type in your sentence, and then drop down to the male or female speaker.

Have you read the abair FAQ? It seems to me you are complaining about it not being something it does not claim to be.

quote:

Abair.ie is a speech synthesiser for the Irish language — it turns written words into speech. (The word "abair" means 'say'.) This is a beta (test) version that is being developed and updated on an ongoing basis. Continual, long-term development is necessary for any speech synthesiser. This is true for all languages, but Irish poses a particular challenge because certain basic resources that are needed are not yet available. Therefore, we have a lot of research to do to develop these resources alongside the synthesiser.

Merci beaucoup! Go raibh maith agat. Thank you.

No, do not misunderstand me Aonghus. I am not complaining. I was just saying that the French version that I found was a lot better in terms of comparison. I am certain that there is a lot more work being done for text to speech technology for major languags than is currently being done for the Irish one, or any minor language for that matter.

I was just thinking that if we could find a way to create a higher quality text to speech, then maybe Irish would have an online tool that could really reach out to people like me who often struggle with pronunciations because we do not have a native speaker near by to help us.

I have found this synthesizer to be very helpful also, however, there have been a few times that the sounds I was interested in listening to were the same sounds that didn't come across clearly.

Then I suggest you tell them! That would help. Especially if you can give them IPA or whatever.

At the moment, as far as I know, the abair group in TCD are the only show in town. They have a feeback page - use it!