Speech Synthesis System for the Holy Quran Recitation

Nadjla Bettayeb and Mhania Guerti

Department of Electronics, Signal and Communications Laboratory Ecole Nationale Polytechnique, Algeria

Abstract: This paper aims to develop a Text-To-Speech (TTS) synthesis system for the holly Quran recitation, to properly helps reciters and facilitates its use. In this work, the unit selection method is adopted and improved to reach a good speech quality. The proposed approach consists mainly of two steps. In the first one, an Expert System (ES) module is integrated by employing Arabic, Quran language, phonetic and phonological features. This part was considered as a preselection to optimize the synthesis algorithm's speed. The second step is the final selection of units by minimizing a concatenation cost function and a forward-backward dynamic programming search. The system is evaluated by native and non-native Arabic speakers. The results show that the goal of a correct Quran recitation by respecting its reading rules was reached, with 97 % of speech intelligibility and 72.13% of naturalness.

Keywords: Speech synthesis, holy Quran, unit selection, expert system, Arabic language processing, tajweed rules.

Received March 21, 2019; accepted April 10, 2020