Text to Speech System for Meitei Mayek Script

2025/08/09 by Gangular Singh Irengbam, Irengbam, Gangular Singh, Nirvash Singh Wahengbam +5
Arts and Humanities · Computer Science · #Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS) #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Language, Linguistics, Cultural Analysis #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Sound (cs.SD) #Speech Recognition and Synthesis #electronic engineering #information engineering

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2508.06870

openalex publication_date 2025/08/09 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

This paper presents the development of a Text-to-Speech (TTS) system for the Manipuri language using the Meitei Mayek script. Leveraging Tacotron 2 and HiFi-GAN, we introduce a neural TTS architecture adapted to support tonal phonology and under-resourced linguistic environments. We develop a phoneme mapping for Meitei Mayek to ARPAbet, curate a single-speaker dataset, and demonstrate intelligible and natural speech synthesis, validated through subjective and objective metrics. This system lays the groundwork for linguistic preservation and technological inclusion of Manipuri.

Citations

• ELAICHI: Enhancing Low-resource TTS by Addressing Infrequent and Low-frequency Character Bigrams
• IndicVoices-R: Unlocking a Massive Multilingual Multi-speaker Speech Corpus for Scaling Indian TTS
• Towards Building Text-To-Speech Systems for the Next Billion Users
• Low-Resource End-to-end Sanskrit TTS using Tacotron2, WaveGlow and Transfer Learning
• HiFi-GAN: Generative Adversarial Networks for Efficient and High Fidelity Speech Synthesis
• Natural TTS Synthesis by Conditioning WaveNet on Mel Spectrogram Predictions
• Tacotron: Towards End-to-End Speech Synthesis

Related

• MunTTS: A Text-to-Speech System for Mundari
• Kinship in Speech: Leveraging Linguistic Relatedness for Zero-Shot TTS in Indian Languages
• RASMALAI: Resources for Adaptive Speech Modeling in Indian Languages with Accents and Intonations
• Towards Building Text-To-Speech Systems for the Next Billion Users
• MahaTTS: A Unified Framework for Multilingual Text-to-Speech Synthesis