How a TTS can help businesses?
The huge quantity of dynamic data that people need to check, on the move, about their daily activities as news, sports, weather, stock options, bank accounts, E-mails etc., is on the rise. It thus needs a powerful TTS engine that converts them into human voice in real time, and at the same time to be able to handle the tremendous load of telephone calls using the latest techniques in load balancing and streaming.

How a TTS technology can save money and time?
The TTS technology is becoming inevitable in some businesses that need to feed their customers with the latest and vital information in real time. These businesses usually use IVR (Interactive Voice Response) systems and call centers to communicate this information to their customers and prospects. Converting vital data stored in Web sites, databases and files into human voice using the traditional expensive and time-consuming human recordings in studios is becoming a hard and long process since the information is usually dynamic. In some cases, it would be impossible to track these changes using the human recordings way. Only a powerful TTS engine that supports Arabic and English languages can be the right solution for the information stored in IVR systems and call centers.

Why an Arabic TTS is different?
Arabic is a difficult language and it is not like languages as English, French, or Spanish. Those languages, written in Latin alphabet, have vowels while the Arabic language has special characters called "diacritics". These diacritics give the Arabic words the correct meaning inside a sentence. For example, two Arabic words that have different meanings can be written exactly the same and only the diacritics can help the reader to distinguish them. Examples of diacritics are " ð ó õ ñ"
For this reason, Sakhr developed the Diacritizer engine. This engine can put the diacritics needed in Arabic texts automatically. The Diacritizer is the main component in Arabic TTS. Without the Diacritizer, the output quality of the TTS engine would be inaccurate and not clear. Since Arabic native speakers write Arabic text without diacritics, the TTS engine should handle the non-diacritized text. The Diacritizer will convert the non-diacritized text into a diacritized text and then the TTS engine will convert it to a clear and human Arabic voice.

How to License Sakhr TTS?
Sakhr TTS is licensed for developers as an SDK (Software Development Kit) and for end users as run-time licenses.

Please contact George N. Hallak
for more info about Sakhr Enterprise Solutions pricing models.
 

The Technology
Text-to-speech technology converts any computer readable text into a human sounding synthetic speech. Arabic is at least one order of magnitude difficult than other common languages due to the lack of diacritics, i.e. vowelization needed to properly utter any input text.

A major limitation encountering the development of Arabic TTS was the constraints imposed by handling undiacritized Arabic text. Sakhr automatic Diacritizer is integrated with a speech synthesizer engine to produce a real system with undiacritized Arabic as input and high quality speech as output. The generation of such an output would be impossible without an automatic Diacritizer, due to the abundance of different pronunciation of the majority of the words without diacritics. Sakhr used its unique diacritizer to provide the TTS synthesizer with the adequate vowelization to produce a natural and intelligible sound.

Sakhr text-to-speech (TTS) engine is composed of three basic parts. The Linguistic Module converts the input text into a phonetic transcription. The Phonetic Module calculates speech parameters, and the Acoustic Module uses those parameters to generate synthetic speech signals.

The Linguistic Module
This module is composed of four parts: Text Normalization, Grapheme To Phoneme (G2P) conversion, Lexical Analysis and Syntactic Analysis. Text Normalization handles language dependent abbreviations, dates, currencies, time indications, phone numbers and other special symbols. It also correctly handles quotation marks, Parentheses, apostrophes and punctuation marks. After Grapheme To Phoneme conversion, the system resolves pronunciation ambiguities, through lexical and syntactic analysis, and identifies the proper prosodic phrases for each sentence. The output is a phonetic representation of the input text.

The Phonetic Module
The Phonetic Module performs segmental synthesis and creates high quality prosodic patterns. In order to create synthetic speech, Sakhr engine is flexible enough to use the proper speech segments such as diphones, triphones, tetraphones or much more. Those segments, which are taken from human speech, preserve phoneme transitions as well as co-articulation effects. By concatenating the speech segments, high quality synthetic speech is obtained. To synthesize intelligible and natural sounding speech, it is essential to create good prosodic characteristics. This is accomplished through the production of good intonation contours and the assignment of the correct duration to each phoneme.

The Acoustic Module
The Acoustic Processing Module converts the speech data that was created previously, into speech signals. The Sakhr concatenation of speech segments and the synthesis of prosody are based on the latest synthesis techniques. The output is an array of wave samples with sampling rates ranging from 8 to 44kHz to cover a broad range of quality and applications from telephony to CD audio quality.

Development Tools & Application Programming Interface
For Sakhr customers, Application Programming Interfaces (API) are available in a Software Development Kit (SDK), ActiveX control and COM object. The functionality of the APIs varies depending on the market and the intended use of the end product. Some of the functions of the APIs are to provide the application developer a way to initiate and stop the text-to-speech synthesis, select the correct exception dictionaries, as well as load the proper application and language. In addition to the APIs, other application design tools such as an editor to develop personal exception dictionaries are available and SAPI 4 and SAPI 5.1 versions are available upon customer request.

Feature Set

• Convert any computer text into natural sounding speech output with phonetic input support.
• Control speaker volume, speech rate, and speech pitch
• Natural sounding speech output in both male & female voices.
• Editor for personal exception dictionary
• Sakhr SDK, is a Windows based SW package for application developers and prototyping.
• Supports Arabic Language as default and automatically handles Latin characters as English text. Any SAPI compliant English, German, Spanish, French, Italian etc. can replace the built in English TTS.

Hardware Availability
Sakhr has ported its text-to-speech, APIs and application development tools to a vast range of hardware solutions. Sakhr supports for example, a full system on Intel Pentium III or higher machines, Computer Telephony (CT) boards, Audiotext platforms.

Please contact George N. Hallak
for more info about Sakhr Enterprise Solutions pricing models.