Design of an advanced Text-To-Speech system for Afrikaans

Word processed copy.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 87-92).Afrikaans is the home language to approximately six million people in South Africa. The need for an Afrikaans TTS system comes with the growing interest in integrating speech technology in all eleven languages of the country. The ultimate goal here is to enable communication between man and machine using speech. This can be achieved with the use of speech technology by implementing multilingual technological systems that all the people in South Africa can understand and relate to. Understandability, flexibility, naturalness and pleasantnedd are the requirements of an advanced TTS system. The technique of concatentative speech synthesis has been the most successful in meeting all these requirements. The Festival speech synthesis system uses two popular concatenative techniques to design new TTS systems in different languages. The techniques are: diphone concatenative synthesis (DCS) and unit selection synthesis (USS)