Development of robotic voice conversion for RIBO using text-to-speech synthesis

RIBO is the first social interaction robot in Bangladesh. This robot is designed and developed by 'ROBO SUST' team of Shahjalal University of Science and Technology. RIBO is able to hands and eyes ups and downs, can walk very slowly and can speak some Bengali recorded sentences. Now the 'ROBO SUST' team is trying to develop the RIBO so that it can communicate with human. One of the parts to communicate with human is convert bengali text to bengali speech in robotic voice. In this article, we propose a method which will convert bengali text to speech in robotic voice using google text to speech system and ring modulator. There are existed some text to speech synthesizer system which can convert bengali text to bengali speech. Among these TTS synthesizer system google TTS system for bengali is better. Hence, we use google text to speech system to produce bengali speech from any bengali written text. Google TTS synthesizer system produces speech as audio object file which can be converted to .mp3 file. Then we modify this .mp3 file using the characteristics of diode and ring modulator concept to get machine voice. After changing pitch and speed of this machine voice we get our final robotic voice which will be used in RIBO as his voice.