When Spelling Leaves Tone Out: What Morpho-VITS Adds to Kinyarwanda TTS
TL;DR for operators Morpho-VITS1 improves Kinyarwanda text-to-speech on both automatic and native-listener evaluation. Compared with a VITS baseline, word error rate falls from 13.4% to 9.4%, while perceived intelligibility rises from 92.1% to 96.7%. Listener scores also improve for naturalness and intonation. The architectural change is explicit linguistic structure. Kinyarwanda spelling does not mark all of the tonal information needed for natural speech, so Morpho-VITS separately represents the meaningful grammatical and lexical pieces inside words and feeds that information into phoneme-level processing. ...