How can I make Microsoft consider adding Faroese language to Speech Services

Question

I need text-to-speech services for Faroese in Speech Services.

How would I go about getting Microsoft to consider this request? Is there any way for me myself to train a custom voice, for a language that doesn't yet exist in Microsoft's repository of languages?

In Faroese, there is access to a huge amount of quality audio resources and transcripts, perfect for training a TTS voice. I have trained a custom voice using other solutions, but I would really like to get Faroese into Microsoft's speech solutions as well.

Here is what the public dataset contains:

• Transcribed recordings, approx. 100 hours
• Full form dictionary with phonetic transcription, 24.000 lemmas
• Guides in Faroese and English
• PAROLE (part of speech) for Faroese
• Faroese SAMPA
• Background text corpus, approx. 25 million words

Request background:

I have my App: VoisIT out on App Store and Google Play, ready to use a high quality TTS service for Faroese, but so far there are very few TTS Engines that support it (I think only one so far). But as the resources have become ready now, I would assume that it is quite doable these days, to get this language implemented using AI.

Dataset for training: https://mtd.setur.fo/en/resource/ravnur-blark-1-0/

VoisIT app:

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/dk/app/voisit/id6459887023

Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.isolveit.voisit

Current text-to-speech progress:

Work-in-progress TTS model for Faroese: http://teldutala.voisit.fo/

Please, if someone can help me on this, it will be very much appreciated!

Thanks!

Answer 1

Hi @68046286

Thank you for using the Microsoft Q&A forum and for providing detailed information about your requirements.

Microsoft Azure Cloud's Speech Services currently does not support Faroese language. I suggest you submit a feature request to Microsoft to consider adding Faroese language to Speech Services.

I hope you understand. Thank you.