QCRI Creates Real-Time Arabic TTS

The Arabic Language Technologies Team at the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) has created a real-time Arabic text-to-speech system.

The system comes with two voices, one call Hamza, which is suitable for news and reading, and another called Amina, which is more expressive for younger audiences.

"Automatic speech generation is an important technology that impacts our lives on a daily basis. Such technology is not a luxury anymore, but rather a necessity, as it provides a solution to many challenging problems." said Ahmed Abdelali, senior software engineer in the Arabic Language Technologies department at QCRI, in a statement. "From conventional applications like voice notifications and book readers to more sophisticated voice assistants, TTS technologies provide the core technology of converting text to natural voice signals. While TTS technologies are not old, recent breakthroughs in deep learning have allowed us to build more sophisticated models that are fast and produce voices indistinguishable from human speech. Generating a human-like voice that is clear and understandable was a dream that our researchers were eager to achieve, and we are very proud of their achievement."