Comparison of TTS System Efficiency: A Pilot Study of Word Intelligibility between Siri and Google Translate with Thai Language

摘要

This study presents a comparative study of the word intelligibility of two popular applications, Siri and Google Translate, that are widely used on smartphones. Both of them have text-to-speech synthesis (TTS) functions. This is a pilot study based on Thai words, both general and often-misread words. Each group consists of 500 words. After conducting the word intelligibility tests, it appears that both Siri and Google Translate (GT) are good at synthesizing general Thai words with 95.4 % and 98.8 % efficiency respectively. However, for commonly misread words, Siri shows its TTS efficiency of 81.8%, while Google Translate shows its TTS performance of 72.2%. Focusing on the often-misread words, the results that are investigated using the t-test shows that there are significant differences between both applications with the p-value of less than 0.001. However, to confirm the findings from this study, the future work with a huge number of Thai words and the sentence intelligibility should be conducted.