Development of a G2P Conversion System for Yoruba TTS System

This work presents a system for generating the phonemic description of the sound corresponding to a piece of Yorùbá text. The study and analysis of the Yorùbá texts with focus on extracting the knowledge needed in developing a grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) system based on Yorùbá text was carried out. The results of the study have been presented and discussed with a view to provide a key to the most suitable Yorùbá transcription for texts. The result shows that the Yorùbá G2P system has a systematic concept underlying it and this concept can be specified, analysed and represented using computational tools. Also, the result of this study has general application in Yorùbá TTS from reading and listening to computerized books on ones' email. It also allows the visually impaired and those who cannot read Yoruba have access to Yorùbá electronic content such as the World Wide Web. Lastly, The software developed as part of this research can be an effective component in language study/ education and can as well be adapted to other tone languages.