TEXT TO SPEECH SYNTHESIS FOR GHANAIAN LOCAL LANGUAGES (Twi)

Abstract Businesses in Ghana do communicate with each other through letters, telephones, fax, and emails. Due to the growth of technology, most of these businesses are providing their services online to make it convenient for customers. However, these mediums of communication have some limitations when it comes to language. In the instance where the parties involved in the communication speak and understand different languages, it becomes difficult to understand. Businesses would like to reach out to these people in a language they can understand. Statistics have shown that almost half of the Ghanaian Adult (15 and above) population are illiterates however they also need to do business as well to take care of their family. The challenge is that due to their inability to understand the message, either in text or audio, they tend to be left out in this age of technology growth. As a solution, this paper intends to develop a text-to-speech application system in Twi which can be used to develop prompts for Interactive Voice Response.