Developing resources for te reo Māori text to speech synthesis system

Abstract

Te reo Māori (the Māori language of New Zealand) is an under-resourced language in terms of availability of speech corpora and resources needed to develop robust speech technology. Māori is an endangered indigenous language which has been subject to revitalisation efforts since the late 1970s, which are well known internationally. The Māori community recognises the need for developing speech technology tools for the language, which will improve its study and usage in wider and more digital contexts. This paper describes the development of speech resources in Māori to build one of the first Text To Speech synthesis system for the language. A speech corpus, extended dictionary and a parametric speech synthesiser are the main contributions of the study. To develop these resources, text processing, segmentation and alignment, letter to sound rules creation were also done with existing resources that were modified to be used for Māori. The acoustic similarity of synthesised speech vs natural speech was measured to evaluate the speech synthesis system statistically. Future work required is described.