Text-to-speech system for low-resource languages: A case study in Shipibo-Konibo (a Panoan language from Peru)

Daniel Menendez, Hector Gomez


Abstract
This paper presents the design and development of a Text-to-Speech (TTS) model for Shipibo-Konibo, a low-resource indigenous language spoken mainly in the Peruvian Amazon. Despite the challenge posed by the scarcity of data, the model was trained with over 4 hours of recordings and 3,025 meticulously collected written sentences. The tests results demon strated an intelligibility rate (IR) exceeding 88% and a mean opinion score (MOS) of 4.01, confirming the quality of the audio generated by the model, which comprises the Tacotron 2 spectrogram predictor and the HiFi-GAN vocoder. Furthermore, the potential of this model to be trained in other indigenous languages spoken in Peru is highlighted, opening a promising avenue for the documentation and revitalization of these languages.
Anthology ID:
2025.americasnlp-1.1
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on NLP for Indigenous Languages of the Americas (AmericasNLP)
Month:
May
Year:
2025
Address:
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Editors:
Manuel Mager, Abteen Ebrahimi, Robert Pugh, Shruti Rijhwani, Katharina Von Der Wense, Luis Chiruzzo, Rolando Coto-Solano, Arturo Oncevay
Venues:
AmericasNLP | WS
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1–7
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/Author-page-Marten-During-lu/2025.americasnlp-1.1/
DOI:
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Cite (ACL):
Daniel Menendez and Hector Gomez. 2025. Text-to-speech system for low-resource languages: A case study in Shipibo-Konibo (a Panoan language from Peru). In Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on NLP for Indigenous Languages of the Americas (AmericasNLP), pages 1–7, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Text-to-speech system for low-resource languages: A case study in Shipibo-Konibo (a Panoan language from Peru) (Menendez & Gomez, AmericasNLP 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/Author-page-Marten-During-lu/2025.americasnlp-1.1.pdf