

Problems, Future Work, and How You can Help
--------------------------------------------

1.  The speech output appears rather slow right now. The reason for this is
    that basic sounds have been recorded individually instead of being
    recorded as parts of words. The next version aims to do precisely this.
    This should speed up the speech output and also reduce the size of the
    database down to about 500KB. 

2.  Dynamic speed and pitch modification needs to be incorporated. We have
    TD-PSOLA code running on a prototype and could add that to the next
    version, but somebody please tell us whether this method is patented
    and therefore, not amenable to free distribution.

3.  Consonant-Consonant junctions are currently not  very satisfactory;
    either there are large gaps, or sounds get gobbled up. Some attention
    needs to be paid to this. The next version will record more of these
    cluster characters. 

4.  Multiple voices need to be added. A major challenge here is to automate
    the process of going from recording to setting up the database. 
    The main obstacle here is that of automatic segmentation of the recording.
    Work is currently in progress on this front. 

5.  The phonetic description used by this version is cumbersome; the next
    version needs a more friendly phonetic description, something which is
    akin to transcription in Roman, possibly with markups for duration and
    pitch. 

6.  Text-to-Phonetics modules need to be written for all Indian languages. 
    Currently we have only Hindi and Kannada,all other languages need
    need to be addressed. 

7.  As mentioned on the technical description page the Hindi text-to-phonetics
    algorithm for compound words needs to be improved, i.e., compound words
    need to be indentified,  decomposed into basic words, and the algorithm
    must be run on each basic word. It is not clear how this can be done
    without using a lexicon. 



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In case you want to contribute, please send mail to the authors.

