Implementation of a Text-to-Speech System for Kurdish Language

Nowadays the concatenative synthesis method is becoming more popular for the text to speech systems. The quality of synthetic speech is improving steadily, and the application field is also expanding rapidly. Today, speech synthesizers of various qualities are available as several different products for many common languages. In this paper, we give an overview of the Kurdish Text-to-Speech (TTS) system that we have developed at the University of Kurdistan. This system is based on the state-of-the-art of concatenative speech synthesizers. A brief review of the major system components is presented with emphasis on the features that are more relevant to the Kurdish language. Remaining challenges and future research directions are also discussed.