Moratuwa University competes at APICTA 2010

Friday, 15 October 2010 01:13 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

AMORA, the award winning text to speech system of the University of Moratuwa, is competing with several other tertiary student category projects from Australia, Pakistan, India, Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia at APICTA 2010 currently being held at Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia.

From left: Chandana Bandara, K V Kuganathan BCS Committee Member, Shanta R Yapa APICTA Economy Coordinator (Sri Lanka) and Supun Vindana Bulathsinhala at the Kuala Lumpur Convention Center after the presentation

Project AMORA is a text to speech system for Sinhala Unicode which receives raw text as input and produces audible speech output. This project is developed with the intention of broadening the IT knowledge spectrum of the local community and the visually impaired people in the country.

The AMORA team comprising Thilini Liyangama (Project Leader), Chandana Bandara, Supun Vindana Bulathsinghala, Sithara Lakmal had the main objective of developing a complete Sinhala text to speech synthesis system for everyday use.

The system delivers a clear, understandable speech output which is similar to the human voice by incorporating native linguistic and prosodic characteristics, in the Sinhala language. Prof Gihan Dias and Dr Sanath Jayasena acted as the supervisors of AMORA.

In achieving the objectives, AMORA has successfully accomplished a new Sinhala female voice, a novel phrase breaking algorithm to predicting phrase breaks in Sinhala language incorporating Sinhala linguistic features and an end user application of the Sinhala text to speech system.