rhasspy
Kurdish model needed
We desperately need Kurdish TTS to support people without speech. There are no TTS systems supporting this (apart from eSpeak)
I'm really parking this here as a note to anyone else wanting to do this too. Here are some datasets
- https://github.com/AsoSoft/AsoSoft-TTS-Speech-Corpus-for-Central-Kurdish
- https://data.mendeley.com/datasets/gft65z43hs/1
(sort of related:
- https://huggingface.co/Akashpb13/Central_kurdish_xlsr
- https://huggingface.co/datasets/navinaananthan/Kurdish-Sorani-Parallel-Corpus )
The next version of Piper will be moving away from espeak (for licensing reasons), so I will need a pronunciation dictionary for Kurdish similar to these: https://mfa-models.readthedocs.io/en/latest/dictionary/index.html#dictionary
The dictionary can be generated with espeak-ng too, though the quality depends on aspects of the language itself. Arabic is especially difficult because the written form can be spoken many different ways depending on context.
espeak and its successor espeak-ng are LGPL. Depending on who you ask, this means that any project using it should also be some form of GPL. Since Piper is MIT licensed, I want to make sure there's no question that it can be used everywhere.