A survey on speech synthesis techniques in Indian languages

The text to speech technology has achieved significant progress during the past decade and is an active area of research and development in providing different human-computer interactive systems. Even though a number of speech synthesis models are available for different languages focusing on the domain requirements with many motive applications, a source of information on current trends in Indian language speech synthesis is unavailable till date making it difficult for the beginners to initiate research for the development of TTS systems for the low-resourced languages. This paper provides a review of the contributions made by different researchers in the field of Indian language speech synthesis along with a study on the Indian language characteristics and the associated challenges in designing TTS systems. A set of available applications and tools results out of different projects undertaken by different organizations along with a set of possible future developments are also discussed to provide a single reference to an important strand of research in speech synthesis which may benefit anyone interested to initiate research in this area.