Design and Implementation of a Talking Luganda Clock and Calendar

Abstract

Software Clocks and Calendars with Text-To-Speech capabilities have been around for quite a while in languages like English, French and German. Our project sought to replicate these systems in Luganda. Our methodology was to first design a digital clock and a calendar in a web interface, and then use MaryTTS, a free text-to-speech development platform, to build and integrate a Luganda voice in our interface. This required phonetic transcription with Java and a MySQL database containing audios recorded by professional voice talent from CBS radio, their corresponding text and phonetic transcriptions and tags. This was followed up by training of the voice using Mary Voice import tools and finally uploading the voice to be accessed at the click of a button from our interface. Our findings were that previous work in the field of speech synthesis in Luganda was not natural sounding, and we expect our project to make improvements in terms of intelligibility and naturalness.