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.