# Multilingual Text-to-Speech Synthesis for Turkic Languages Using Transliteration

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.15749 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15749/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Natural TTS Synthesis by Conditioning WaveNet on Mel Spectrogram Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05884/) (2017)
- [Tacotron: Towards End-to-End Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.10135/) (2017)
- [Parallel WaveGAN: A fast waveform generation model based on generative adversarial networks with multi-resolution spectrogram](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11480/) (2019)
- [Choosing Transfer Languages for Cross-Lingual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12688/) (2019)
- [ESPnet-TTS: Unified, Reproducible, and Integratable Open Source End-to-End Text-to-Speech Toolkit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10909/) (2019)
- [End-to-end Text-to-speech for Low-resource Languages by Cross-Lingual Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06508/) (2019)
- [KazNERD: Kazakh Named Entity Recognition Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13419/) (2021)
- [A Crowdsourced Open-Source Kazakh Speech Corpus and Initial Speech Recognition Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.10334/) (2020)
- [KazakhTTS: An Open-Source Kazakh Text-to-Speech Synthesis Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08459/) (2021)
- [KazakhTTS2: Extending the Open-Source Kazakh TTS Corpus With More Data, Speakers, and Topics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05771/) (2022)
- [A Study of Multilingual End-to-End Speech Recognition for Kazakh, Russian, and English](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01280/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [TurkicNLP: An NLP Toolkit for Turkic Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19174/) (2026)
- [Optimizing Multilingual Text-To-Speech with Accents & Emotions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16310/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This work aims to build a multilingual text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis system for ten lower-resourced Turkic languages: Azerbaijani, Bashkir, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Sakha, Tatar, Turkish, Turkmen, Uyghur, and Uzbek. We specifically target the zero-shot learning scenario, where a TTS model trained using the data of one language is applied to synthesise speech for other, unseen languages. An end-to-end TTS system based on the Tacotron 2 architecture was trained using only the available data of the Kazakh language. To generate speech for the other Turkic languages, we first mapped the letters of the Turkic alphabets onto the symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), which were then converted to the Kazakh alphabet letters. To demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach, we evaluated the multilingual Turkic TTS model subjectively and obtained promising results. To enable replication of the experiments, we make our code and dataset publicly available in our GitHub repository.