KICS UET Works for Disabled Community
KICS UET Lahore’s lab CLE currently is working on ‘Urdu Voice Enabled Assistive Technologies for Print Disabled Community of Pakistan’ and this project is funded by NRPU-HEC (National Research Program for Universities
Higher Education Commission, Pakistan).
This venture is swathed with numerous beneficial objectives – some of them are mentioned as under:
- To improve Urdu TTS in the areas of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and speech synthesis.
- To improve date formats that contain English slashes (/), commas (,), dashes (-), dots (.) and English names of months (e.g., March, Mar) will be handled.
- Support for handling English text will be added
- In addition to the 70,000 words vocabulary, the phonetic lexicon used by the TTS system will be enhanced by adding 10,000 transliterated English words.
- To enhance Urdu TTS for using a single voice with Urdu accent to read aloud mixed content, containing both Urdu and English.
- To improve the response time of the Urdu TTS; the speech quality for naturalness and intelligibility.
- Deep learning based voice will be developed for Urdu TTS.
- 4 hours Urdu speech corpus will be developed and annotated at intonation level to improve the naturalness and intelligibility of existing Urdu voice of TTS.
- The usability of Urdu TTS will be enhanced by integrating it with SAPI-5.
Urdu Voice Enabled Assistive Technologies for Print Disabled Community is laced with many scopes, some of them are presented here:
- It will be helpful for disabled community including the following:
- Visually impaired community of Pakistan.
- Illiterate populations of Pakistan that can communicate and understand Urdu, but cannot read or write it.
- Urdu second language speakers and non-residing Pakistani citizens, especially younger generation, interested to learn Urdu
- Pakistani citizens, interested in listening to Urdu text, available in the form of digital documents, articles, books etc.