Scientists and researchers at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) are on a quest to create technologies that can better understand and communicate with all South Africans in their own languages, starting with the development of a text-to-speech translator called Qfrency.
The market is inundated with various text-to-speech services from around the globe but most are limited to English. The CSIR’s Human Language Technology (HLT) Research Group has spent the past few years working on the Qfrency project to fill the gap for a service available in indigenous South African languages that could reach millions of citizens across the country.
Back in 2004, the HLT Reserach Group started off with indigenous text-to-speech software by partnering with the Local Language Speech Technology Initiative (LLSTI) to develop the Buhle general domain isiZulu text-to-speech system based on the open source Festival Speech Synthesis System.
Qfrency is a continuation of project Lwazi, a project which came after Buhle, that sought to build similar individual systems for each of the 11 official languages. Qfrency instead aims to combine all of them into one system.
“South Africa is a multilingual country, with eleven official languages, requiring unique text-to-speech solutions to accommodate the diversity of languages,” the council says.
“The aim of our research is, inter alia, to develop systems, tools and applications which leverage the power of technology to deliver access to information and services in a user’s language of choice; increase productivity; and optimise educational opportunities (especially for people with low literacy levels, and with disabilities).”
Qfrency currently caters for Afrikaans and English, while the other nine languages will be added as soon as funding to further the project is available.
A demo on the Qfrency site features two female voices that can read back text in Afrikaans and English. You can type a sentence into the text box and generate audio that will open up in a new tab and be played back to you.
The system can be used on mobile and desktop (on Windows 8, Linux and Android) and businesses and organisations can have it integrated into separate apps through the Qfrency app programming interface.
The next step is get Qfrency commercialsed, which is CSIR is currently looking for companies that can help do so by working with the council to upgrade and enhance it as well as licencing, reselling, hosting and supporting it the technology.
We’re going to be following up with CSIR to find out more about the science behind Qfrency and when we can expect African languages to be added to the platform soon.
