Text to Speech System for Meitei Mayek Script
This work addresses the problem of linguistic preservation and technological inclusion for the Manipuri language, representing an incremental application of existing methods to a new domain.
The paper tackled the problem of developing a Text-to-Speech system for the Manipuri language using the Meitei Mayek script, resulting in intelligible and natural speech synthesis validated through subjective and objective metrics.
This paper presents the development of a Text-to-Speech (TTS) system for the Manipuri language using the Meitei Mayek script. Leveraging Tacotron 2 and HiFi-GAN, we introduce a neural TTS architecture adapted to support tonal phonology and under-resourced linguistic environments. We develop a phoneme mapping for Meitei Mayek to ARPAbet, curate a single-speaker dataset, and demonstrate intelligible and natural speech synthesis, validated through subjective and objective metrics. This system lays the groundwork for linguistic preservation and technological inclusion of Manipuri.