| African Speech Technology |
[Dec. 9th, 2003|06:04 pm] |
The African Speech Technology is a consortium of researchers and institutions working on creating language and speech technology applications for the official languages of South Africa. Some of the long term goals appear to include developing nifty things like speech synthesis in Zulu, Xhosa (pronounced Kosa), Sesotho and Afrikaans. At present they are focusing on a limited domain task for automatically handling hotel reservations. Albert Visagie, one of the collaborators in the project, has a small interactive (concatenative) synthesis demo at his site which generates a few test utterances in English, Afrikaans and Xhosa. Play with Xhosa and hear the clicks!
An interesting remark from his site:
In Xhosa, numbers are prefixed according to the noun the refer to, and the numbers are very tedious for anything above 100. Therefore amounts and digit strings are read in English, as English numerals make more sense when the numbers don't refer to anything (digitstrings) or are too big.
I wonder whether this is frequent practice among (bilingual?) Xhosa speakers, or just a technological patch. |
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