Taking Frisian text-to-speech to a higher level
Together, Campus Fryslân and the Fryske Akademy are building a Frisian computer voice that now lets users check the pronunciation of Frisian words with a single click.
Main researchers: Eduard Drenth, Phat Do, Martijn Kingma
Building a voice for Frisian
Frisian is mostly a spoken language, so helping people with pronunciation has long been a wish of the Frisian language community. This project brings that wish closer through a collaboration between Campus Fryslân and the Fryske Akademy (FA).
At Campus Fryslân, Assistant Professor Phat Do works on speech technology that produces a Frisian computer voice. At the FA, native speakers of Frisian with knowledge of phonology listen to and review this voice, so that Phat can keep improving it. As a side effect of this review work, a phonological basis for Frisian is being assembled.
Pronunciation on Frysker.nl
The first step is already in place. The FA’s languageapi has been extended with audio for lemmas and word forms. When audio isn’t available yet, the languageapi calls a service Phat Do built around the Frisian voice. BW H ontwerpers adapted Frysker.nl, so users can now play the audio and hear how a word is pronounced.
The collaboration is valuable for both partners, scientifically and for the broader public.
What’s next
Among the next steps is Frisian speech for sentences and for multiple sentences. This brings its own scientific and technical challenges, and it is the next stage in taking Frisian text to speech to a higher level.
Who is involved
Eduard Drenth
Software architect
Eduard Drenth is a software architect at the Fryske Akademy, where he is co-responsible for ICT policy . He is also involved in the Fryske Akademy’s language databases (Frysker) and the online Dutch-Frisian dictionary as a developer.
Phat Do
Assistant Professor
Phat Do is an assistant professor at Campus Fryslân (University of Groningen). He works on speech technology for low-resource languages, including the synthetic Frisian voice used in FLARESlab projects.
Martijn Kingma
Researcher
Martijn Kingma is a postdoctoral researcher at the Fryske Akademy. His PhD research focused on studies variation and change in the Frisian vowel system, combining sociolinguistic and phonetic methods.
