IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/paitcp/978-3-319-05963-1_8.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

An Implementation of isiXhosa Text-to-Speech Modules to Support e-Services in Marginalized Rural Areas

In: User-Centric Technology Design for Nonprofit and Civic Engagements

Author

Listed:
  • Okuthe P. Kogeda

    (Tshwane University of Technology)

  • Siphe Mhlana

    (University of Fort Hare)

  • Thinyane Mamello

    (University of Fort Hare)

  • Thomas Olwal

    (Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR))

Abstract

Information and communication technology (ICT) projects are being initiated and deployed in marginalized areas to help improve the standard of living for community members. This has led to a new field, which is responsible for information processing and knowledge development in rural areas, called Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICT4D). A number of ICT4D projects have been implemented in marginalized areas all over the World. Dwesa is such a rural area situated in the wild coast of the former homeland of Transkei, in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. There are e-service projects, i.e., e-commerce, e-health, and e-government, deployed to support the already existent ICT infrastructure in Dwesa. However, community members face a language and literacy barrier to consume these e-services because they are developed and typically accessed through English textual interfaces. This becomes a challenge because their language of communication is isiXhosa and majority of them are illiterate. However, there are tools that can be used to convert English text into isiXhosa text, i.e., Google. Therefore, this chapter seeks to design, develop, and implement a text-to-speech system that can be used to convert isiXhosa text into natural sounding isiXhosa speech. The system was implemented using Festival speech synthesis and MySQL database. The developed text-to-speech system was tested to determine its applicability to improve e-services usability. The results show acceptable levels of usability as having produced audio utterances for the isiXhosa text-to-speech system for marginalized areas. We trained the system with isiXhosa words and sentences with 85 % success rate.

Suggested Citation

  • Okuthe P. Kogeda & Siphe Mhlana & Thinyane Mamello & Thomas Olwal, 2014. "An Implementation of isiXhosa Text-to-Speech Modules to Support e-Services in Marginalized Rural Areas," Public Administration and Information Technology, in: Saqib Saeed (ed.), User-Centric Technology Design for Nonprofit and Civic Engagements, edition 127, chapter 0, pages 113-133, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:paitcp:978-3-319-05963-1_8
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-05963-1_8
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:paitcp:978-3-319-05963-1_8. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.