AAWAJ : AUGMENTATIVE COMMUNICATION SUPPORT FOR THE VOCALLY IMPAIRED USING NEPALI TEXT-TO-SPEECH

Abstract

As of 2016, more than 147,000 of the Nepali population suffer from some variant of speech or hearing impairments. Similarly, there has been a visible scarcity of reliable Text-to- Speech (TTS) engines in the context of the Nepali language. Aawaj is a dedicated mobile application that addresses these impediments to create augmentative communication support for the vocally impaired populace of Nepal using a Nepali TTS engine. BIt utilizes vocal features such as timbre, prosody, rhythm, etc., to create a natural-sounding TTS engine, based on the open-source Tacotron2 TTS architecture published by Google. Rare conditions such as cerebral palsy, spinal cord injury, muscular dystrophy, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) have also led to a physical impediment in speech generation for a large population. This report further proposes an Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) platform using accessibility features such as text prompt generation that provides accessibility to the intended populace of this mobile application.