A Tutorial on Acoustic Phonetic Feature Extraction for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Text-to-Speech (TTS) Applications in African Languages

Authors

Ettien Koffi, St. Cloud State UniversityFollow

Abstract

At present, Siri, Dragon Dictate, Google Voice, and Alexa-like functionalities are not available in any indigenous African language. Yet, a 2015 Pew Research found that between 2002 to 2014, mobile phone usage increased tenfold in Africa, from 8% to 83%.[1] The Acoustic Phonetic Approach (APA) discussed in this paper lays the foundation that will make Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Text-to-Speech (TTS) applications possible in African languages. The paper is written as a tutorial so that others can use the information therein to help digitalize many of the continent’s indigenous languages.

[1] http://www.pewglobal.org/2015/04/15/cell-phones-in-africa-communication-lifeline/. Retrieved on November 10, 2017.

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.

Recommended Citation

Koffi, Ettien (2020) "A Tutorial on Acoustic Phonetic Feature Extraction for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Text-to-Speech (TTS) Applications in African Languages," Linguistic Portfolios: Vol. 9, Article 11.
Available at: https://repository.stcloudstate.edu/stcloud_ling/vol9/iss1/11