CSIR's New TTS Offers South African Voices

The CSIR Meraka Institute has developed commercial-grade text-to-speech voices in South African. These include a South African English female voice and an Afrikaans female voice, with plans to develop additional voices in the remaining official languages as funding becomes available.

These voices together with the text-to-speech (TTS) engine used to synthesise the synthetic voices constitute a technology package called Qfrency. The TTS engine and TTS voices are customizable to the end user's needs and languages.

The CSIR is now looking to identify a commercialization partnerto help it take the Qfrency offering to market. Such a partner would licence the technology from CSIR and be responsible for reselling, hosting, and supporting it.