Online Speech Translation System for Tamil

Madhavaraj Ayyavu, Shiva Kumar H R and Ramakrishnan A G

Abstract:

In this paper, we present an application, which recognizes spoken Tamil utterances and speaks out the recognized text in Tamil through our Tamil text-to-speech (TTS) system. Further, we translate the recognized Tamil text to English using google translate and play it through our English TTS. Our Tamil speech recognition system, which can recognize about 75,000 words, has been trained on a 150-hour transcribed speech corpus. We have trained a deep neural network for the acoustic model and employed tri-gram language models to build our recognition system. Our Thirukkural TTS system performs unit-selection based, concatenative speech synthesis, using 2.5 hours of Tamil spoken utterances transcribed at the phone-level. Our English TTS uses 2.7 hours of phone-transcribed utterances. This is a technology demonstration of a complete web application, which, when perfected, could be used to assist Tamil users in learning English, by speaking in Tamil into the system. The playback of the recognized text from Tamil TTS serves to demonstrate the effectiveness of the Tamil ASR to the majority of the conference registrants (who cannot read the recognized Tamil text).

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Cite as: Ayyavu, M., H R, S.K., A G, R. (2018) Online Speech Translation System for Tamil. Proc. Interspeech 2018, 1966-1967.

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BiBTeX Entry:

@inproceedings{Ayyavu2018,
author={Madhavaraj Ayyavu and Shiva Kumar {H R} and Ramakrishnan {A G}},
title={Online Speech Translation System for Tamil},
year=2018,
booktitle={Proc. Interspeech 2018},
pages={1966--1967} }