Kurdish model needed

[willwade]

We desperately need Kurdish TTS to support people without speech. There are no TTS systems supporting this (apart from eSpeak)

I'm really parking this here as a note to anyone else wanting to do this too. Here are some datasets

• https://github.com/AsoSoft/AsoSoft-TTS-Speech-Corpus-for-Central-Kurdish
• https://data.mendeley.com/datasets/gft65z43hs/1

(sort of related:

• https://huggingface.co/Akashpb13/Central_kurdish_xlsr
• https://huggingface.co/datasets/navinaananthan/Kurdish-Sorani-Parallel-Corpus
  )

[synesthesiam]

The next version of Piper will be moving away from espeak (for licensing reasons), so I will need a pronunciation dictionary for Kurdish similar to these: https://mfa-models.readthedocs.io/en/latest/dictionary/index.html#dictionary

The dictionary can be generated with espeak-ng too, though the quality depends on aspects of the language itself. Arabic is especially difficult because the written form can be spoken many different ways depending on context.

[willwade]

Interesting. Any info on the licensing issues with espeak??

[synesthesiam]

espeak and its successor espeak-ng are LGPL. Depending on who you ask, this means that any project using it should also be some form of GPL. Since Piper is MIT licensed, I want to make sure there's no question that it can be used everywhere.