Scottish Gaelic Text-to-Speech

I'm currently working on a speech synthesizer for Scottish Gaelic, based on the Festival/Festvox system. When it's done it will read Scottish Gaelic text. Right now it only says a few words:

gainne	thraigh
thu	thubhairt
thuirt	tim
tighinn	tilg
tilleadh	timcheall
tinn

Try it out here

• Here is a presentation I put together for the Student Showcase March 7, 2008. Audio is available here, and on iTunes U under University of Arizona > Social & Behavioral Sciences > Linguistics Lectures.
• Here is a presentation from the Arizona Linguistics Circle Conference, held on November 1, 2008. This presentation focuses more on the HMM-based approach, which I have found to be easier than the diphone approach.

Constructing a corpus from a Wikipedia dump

For the HMM-based approach, there has to be a list of phonetically balanced utterances. To do that you need a corpus. The text of Wikipedia can be downloaded and turned into a corpus.

1. Download the Wikipedia dump from here.
2. Run the following command to extract the XML:
   $ bzcat gdwiki-latest-pages-articles.xml.bz2 > gdwiki.xml
3. Then use this python script (from here) to extract the text:
   $ python nowiki-xml2txt.py gdwiki.xml
4. Then clean this up using this regular expression:
   $ cat gdwiki.txt | grep -v "''" | grep -v http | grep -v ';' | grep -v ':' | grep -v '(' | grep -v ')' | grep -v No | grep -vi 'pg.' | grep -v '-'| grep -v '+' | grep -v = | grep -e '................................................' | uniq > gdcorpus.txt
5. After cleaning up some stray English sentences, you get something like this:
   gdcorpus.txt