adfa, p. 1, 2011. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011 Development overview of TTS-MK speech synthesizer for Macedonian language, and its application Slavcho Chungurski 1 , Sime Arsenovski 1 , Dejan Gjorgjevikj 2 1 Faculty of informatics, FON University - Skopje 2 Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering, University of “Sv. Kiril i Metodij” - Skopje {chungurski@fon.edu.mk, sime.arsenovski@fon.edu.mk, dejan.gjorgjevikj@finki.ukim.mk} Abstract. This paper shows the current results of development of TTS-MK – a speech synthesizer for Macedonian language. The basic principles for projecting and building of speech synthesizer for Macedonian language, based on concatenation of speech segments, are shown. Every language has its respective and specific speech norms and characteristics that should be observed during the speech synthesis. The Macedonian language is phonetic; hence the normative pronunciation does not contain great difficulty, except in some special cases that should be taken into consideration. The presentation also focuses on the accent in the Macedonian language, which is dynamic and positioned on the third syllable. The rules and regulations for the accent positioning in the Macedonian language can be easily derived, with some deviations that should be resolved. There are two versions of the system based on different segments corpora. Both of them are presented, as well as their application. Keywords: Text-To-Speech, Macedonian Language, TTS, TTS-MK, Orthoepy, Speech API – SAPI 1 Introduction The systems which synthesize speech with connection of previously recorded speech segments take significant place among the systems for text to speech conversion (TTS systems). These TTS systems are called concatenative speech synthesizers. These systems are simple and they do not require deep knowledge of phonetic transitions and co-articulation effects, which is the case with other kinds of speech synthesizers based on rules defined by linguists. There were some attempts for development of quality concatenative speech synthesizer for Macedonian language, but these developments were based on speech corpora for other Slavic languages, which resulted in unnatural intonation of the synthetic speech in Macedonian language. This paper includes a brief overview of the development of TTS-MK synthesizer for Macedonian language. Concatenative