Feasibility of Irish text-to-speech

[pne]

I wonder how easy it would be to make an Irish text-to-speech program (or, equivalently, a program that takes regular orthography and spits out a phonemic transcription, e.g. in IPA or something similar)... that is, how regular the written-to-spoken correspondences are.

I mean, I know that it's not one sound = one symbol, but I wonder how far you could get by taking vowel digraphs/trigraphs, marking them with a triplet of (pronunciation, broad/slender beginning, broad/slender ending), and using that to infer the pronunciation of surrounding consonants.

Comments

[edricson.livejournal.com]

Actually, it wouldn't be really hard, probably not much harder than for English, if at all. The majoruty of the vowel di- and tri-graphs are in fact unambiguous. Plus the few that are (say, ui) involve dialectal differences (thus ui, if I'm not mistaken, can refer to both [u] and [i], but there is dialectal variation in which high vowel is pronounced anyhow). Plus, many exceptions are actually small lists which any reasonable TTS system can handle.

[4pq1injbok.livejournal.com]

Heh, I didn't expect I'd ever hear anyone call such a problem "not much harder than for English". Irish may be etabnannimous but English is maggelitous (what? (http://conlang.wikia.com/wiki/Conlang_terminology)).

I once broke down and wrote out all the Irish vowel spellings in a chart on my whiteboard, which really helped me see what's going on; all the specifications I could find online were just long laundry lists which are unuseful if one's trying to get the whole scheme of the system into one's head. I wish I'd done that on more durable writing material. :/

[kait-the-great.livejournal.com]

Direct application: GPS navigation tools for the car that read out the street names for you.

In Canada, GPSs with street names included in the audio directions are far more expensive than the tools that only give the directional directions orally but have the street names printed on the screen.

Although in that case, the range of travel is defined when you buy one (usually Canada and the continental US) and they have probably just obtained the phonetics for every street and then just stuck the phonemes together.

[nitaq.livejournal.com]

Irish is the only language I've given up on (for now).
Even though I bough a dictionary and a teach yourself book I don't find enough resources online to compare what I think I the pronunciation is like to someone who knows.
Welsh, Russian and Japanese, all really easy in comparison.

[(Anonymous)]

Text-to-speech in Irish has been done, and done well: www.abair.ie.

[pne]

Ah - thank you!