Acapela Adds North Sami to Its Portfolio of TTS Languages

Sami Parliament of Norway has chosen Acapela Group to develop North Sami language text-to-speech (TTS).

Sami is a language spoken in northern Norway, Finland, and Sweden. Among the many variations of the Sami language, Acapela will develop the most widespread, North Sami, spoken by 20,000 people.

For Acapela, which is based in Belgium, adding Sami TTS is about much more than just building up its language portfolio. It's part of a global project initiated by Sametinget to preserve this minority language.

"We are very happy to add synthetic speech to our Sami resources," said Sami Parliament President Aili Keskitalo, in a statement. "It is an outstanding tool to support Sami language promotion and use, either to read news, teach and learn, share stories, or provide public announcements. Sami text to speech will allow [people] to read any written content with the full respect of Sami grammar and specificities. Audio content in Sami will be accessible to all."

To create Sami TTS, Acapela is using existing databases and lexicons provided by Sametinget and is working in close cooperation with its linguists. Full resources collected since the start of the project in 2005 are being used to create the male and female voices that will be available as Colibri voices, based on Acapela's HMM technology.

This technology allows the company to generate speech from trained statistical models where spectrum and prosody are modeled altogether. It does not require specific recordings or speaker research.

"Latest advancement in text-to-speech and natural language processing allow us to create new languages and voices using existing databases with an acceptable audio result. It opens new opportunities for speech synthesis use, such as the preservation of this minority language, with voices that will be accessible to all. Widely speaking, with Colibri voices we can deal with new constraints and answer market demands with an additional speech solution that will benefit more applications and usages," said Lars-Erik Larsson, CEO of Acapela Group, in a statement.

The project is being carried out by Divvun and Giellatekno (Centre for Sami language technology at the University of Tromso). Development of the system began earlier this month and the finished product will be launched in October 2014.