Nepali Text to Speech

About Nepali text to speech

Nepali is written in Devanagari, an abugida where each consonant carries an inherent 'a' vowel and other vowels attach as marks above, below or beside the letter, so accurate text-to-speech depends on correctly resolving conjunct consonants and the schwa — knowing when that inherent vowel is actually pronounced and when it is silently dropped, a decision Devanagari does not spell out. The language distinguishes aspirated from unaspirated stops and dental from retroflex consonants, contrasts that are meaningful in Nepali and easy for a naive voice to flatten, so the synthesis has to render kha versus ka and the retroflex ट series cleanly. Nepali is heavily honorific, with several politeness levels encoded in pronouns and verb forms, meaning a natural-sounding voice should read formal and respectful registers as fluently as casual ones rather than treating them as anomalies. Real demand comes from Nepal's government and education services reaching a population with significant low-literacy and visually impaired segments, and from the vast Nepali-speaking diaspora across the Gulf, India and beyond who consume Nepali news, religious content and remittance-related communications by audio.