ISCA Archive Interspeech 2025
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2025

Developing High-Quality TTS for Punjabi and Urdu: Benchmarking against MMS Models

Fatima Naseem, Maham Sajid, Farah Adeeba, Sahar Rauf, Asad Mustafa, Sarmad Hussain, Faisal Kamiran

Existing Punjabi text-to-speech (TTS) solutions focus on Gurumukhi script, requiring transliteration from Shahmukhi. This leads to letter substitutions and omissions, resulting in pronunciation errors. In this study, speech corpus, phonetic lexicon, and text analysis module for Punjabi Shahmukhi were developed. Two model architectures: Tacotron 1 and Tacotron 2 with WaveGlow were used to build TTS models. In addition to Punjabi, Urdu TTS models were also developed. These models were benchmarked against Urdu and Punjabi Gurumukhi TTS models provided by Meta’s Massively Multilingual Speech (MMS) which is a top profile multilingual speech project. Objective and subjective evaluations indicate that tacotron based Urdu and Punjabi models outperform MMS in intelligibility, naturalness, and phonetic accuracy, enhancing TTS quality for these languages.

Erratum

One of the co-authors was mistakenly omitted from the published version of the paper. The corrected author list is as follows:

  • Fatima Naseem – Al-Khawarizmi Institute of Computer Science (KICS), University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore, Pakistan
  • Maham Sajid – KICS, University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore, Pakistan
  • Farah Adeeba – KICS, University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore, Pakistan
  • Sahar Rauf – KICS, University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore, Pakistan
  • Asad Mustafa – KICS, University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore, Pakistan
  • Sarmad Hussain – KICS, University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore, Pakistan
  • Faisal Kamiran – Information Technology University (ITU), Lahore, Pakistan

Contact emails: fatimanaseem071@gmail.com, maham.sajid@kics.edu.pk, farah.adeeba@kics.edu.pk, sahar.rauf@kics.edu.pk, asad.mustafa@kics.edu.pk, sarmad.hussain@kics.edu.pk, faisal.kamiran@itu.edu.pk