An implementation of isixhosa text-to-speech modules to support e-services in marginalized rural areas

Abstract

Information and communication technology (ICT) projects are being initiated and deployed in marginalized areas to help improve the standard of living for community members. This has led to a new field, which is responsible for information processing and knowledge development in rural areas, called Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICT4D). A number of ICT4D projects have been implemented in marginalized areas all over the World. Dwesa is such a rural area situated in the wild coast of the former homeland of Transkei, in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. There are e-service projects, i.e., e-commerce, e-health, and e-government, deployed to support the already existent ICT infrastructure in Dwesa. However, community members face a language and literacy barrier to consume these e-services because they are developed and typically accessed through English textual interfaces. This becomes a challenge because their language of communication is isiXhosa and majority of them are illiterate. However, there are tools that can be used to convert English text into isiXhosa text, i.e., Google. Therefore, this chapter seeks to design, develop, and implement a text-to-speech system that can be used to convert isiXhosa text into natural sounding isiXhosa speech. The system was implemented using Festival speech synthesis and MySQL database. The developed text-to-speech system was tested to determine its applicability to improve e-services usability. The results show acceptable levels of usability as having produced audio utterances for the isiXhosa text-to-speech system for marginalized areas. We trained the system with isiXhosa words and sentences with 85 % success rate.