Development of a Māori database for speech perception and generation

Abstract

Māori speech data collection and analysis is an ongoing process, as new and existing data sets are continuously accessed for many different experimental speech perception and generation processing tasks. A data management system is an important tool to facilitate the systematic techniques applied to the speech and language data. Identification of the core components for Māori speech and language databases, translation systems, speech recognition and speech synthesis have been undertaken as research themes. The latter component will be the main area of discussion here. So to hasten the development of Māori speech synthesis, joint collaborative research with established international projects has begun. This will allow the Māori language to be presented to the wider scientific community well in advance of other similar languages, many times it's own size and distribution. Propagation of the Māori language via the information communication technology (ICT) medium is advantageous to it's long term survival.