Or the ability to create your own naturally sounding Welsh language synthetic voices…

Ar part of our work on the Macsen project, we’ve created tools that will enable you to create naturally sounding Welsh language synthetic voices. The tools make it easy for you to prepare recordings scripts, record an individual’s voice, and with its knowledge of Welsh language pronunciation, build for you a Welsh language synthetic voice that sounds very similar to the recorded individual.

Here are examples of the voices of two members of the techiaith team having been synthesized with the new tools:

Male:

Female:

The team had the opportunity to demonstrate these tools at a recent SeneddLab 2017 event where a new voice was created within one hour, named ‘RoboLlywydd’ and used to speak the answers to questions about the National Assembly for Wales. Although the ‘RoboLlywydd’ name was just for fun, it showed that it’s possible to create and use many different individual voices within your own personal digital assistants. The following video talks more about this (especially after the fifth and a half minute):

We used an already open source system called MaryTTS which can now be used to create Welsh voices using the resources at the following GitHub repository: