The Digital India BHASHINI Division under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has developed artificial intelligence-based text-to-speech (TTS) models for Sourashtra, a minority Indo-Aryan language spoken mainly in Tamil Nadu. The work was done with the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bengaluru.
The models turn written Sourashtra text into spoken audio, bringing speech technology to a language that has had little of it.
Sourashtra is spoken predominantly by the Sourashtra community in Tamil Nadu. According to Census 2011, it has about 2.48 lakh speakers.
The models use the VITS architecture (Variational Inference with adversarial learning for end-to-end TTS), which converts written text directly into speech. They support male and female voices and can process text written in either the Tamil script or the Sourashtra script.
BHASHINI's AIKOSH platform hosts the SPICOR TTS 3.0 Sourashtra Corpus, which is meant to support AI research in Indian languages.
The work supports the use of low-resource languages in digital applications, language learning, accessibility solutions, documentation and research.
With reference to the text-to-speech (TTS) models developed for Sourashtra, consider the following statements:
Which of the statements given above are correct?
Consider the following pairs:
Item : Description
How many of the above pairs are correctly matched?
Consider the following statements:
Statement-I: The Sourashtra text-to-speech models were developed by the BHASHINI Division of MeitY together with the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bengaluru.
Statement-II: According to Census 2011, Sourashtra has about 2.48 crore speakers.
Which one of the following is correct in respect of the above statements?
