Breaking Language Barriers with Advanced Quechua and Spanish Speech Synthesis

Speech synthesis technology takes a leap forward with a unified pipeline that crafts high-quality Quechua and Spanish speech for the Peruvian Constitution. This ambitious project employs three new text-to-speech (TTS) architectures: XTTS v2, F5-TTS, and DiFlow-TTS. By training these models on distinct Spanish and Quechua datasets, the team navigates the challenges of heterogeneous recording conditions and dataset sizes.

Why It Matters

This initiative isn't just about technology, it's about cultural preservation and inclusion. Quechua, spoken by millions yet often marginalized in tech, finally gets representation. The synthesis quality, bolstered by cross-lingual transfer, ensures that naturalness in Spanish is maintained while enhancing Quechua speech output. This isn't merely a technical accomplishment. it's a statement on the importance of linguistic diversity.

Bridging The Gap

Cross-lingual transfer plays a critical role here. By tapping into bilingual and multilingual TTS capabilities, the pipeline mitigates one of the biggest hurdles in speech technology: data scarcity for less common languages. This is key. Without such innovations, languages like Quechua risk being left behind in the digital age, unable to compete with more resourced languages.

Reusability and Impact

What sets this work apart is the availability of resources. The team has opened a treasure trove to developers and researchers by releasing trained checkpoints, inference code, and synthesized audio for each article of the Peruvian Constitution. This isn't just a one-off project, it's a reusable asset for further advancements in speech technologies within indigenous and multilingual environments.

How long will it take for other low-resource languages to benefit from similar frameworks? The key contribution of this paper suggests a roadmap for sustainable development in this space. Code and data are available, ensuring the work is reproducible and open to the community.

This builds on prior work from the field, but pushes boundaries by specifically targeting political and legal content. In a world increasingly dominated by digital communication, ensuring that every voice can be heard isn't just a technical challenge, it's a moral imperative.