Transportation

Easy Speech AI Customization for Local Singaporean Voice

Objective

Supporting Drivers with Real-Time Assistance

Customer

NCS Pte Ltd

Partner

Speech AI

Technology

NVIDIA NeMo, NVIDIA Riva, NVIDIA T4 Tensor Core GPU

NCS, a subsidiary of Singtel Group, provides differentiated and end-to-end technology services to clients with its NEXT capabilities in digital, data, cloud, and platforms, as well as core offerings in application, infrastructure, engineering, and cybersecurity. Their Breeze app provides real-time traffic, road updates, and parking information in a local Singaporean voice developed and deployed with NVIDIA Riva speech AI.

Supporting Drivers with Real-Time Assistance

NCS Pte Ltd. is a multinational company and a technology partner of the Singapore government for various transportation projects. For a local and enhanced driving experience, NCS designed Breeze, a local driver’s app with a native Singaporean voice.

Creating a Native Singaporean Voice with NVIDIA Riva

NCS previously used an off-the-shelf cloud service provider text-to-speech (TTS) service that failed to capture a local Singaporean voice. NCS customized the NVIDIA Riva FastPitch model with prosody control over pitch and phoneme duration and built its own TTS engine for English-Singapore using local speakers’ voice data. Today, thousands of users are enjoying the Breeze mobile navigation application with correct Singaporean pronunciation of street and place names.

A Smoother Driving Experience

Results

An English-Singapore voice with native lingo and accent

Real-time high performance and scalability

Flexible deployment in the cloud and on premises

Riva TTS enables Breeze’s voice to pronounce local phrases and street and road names, with more than 30 percent of words originating from Mandarin, Hokkien, Malay, or Tamil with the same clarity and expressiveness as native Singaporeans. Breeze now runs with Riva-scalable Kubernetes deployment on AWS EKS with NVIDIA T4 Tensor Core GPU support and is portable to any containerized on-premises or cloud environment. Easy Speech AI Customization for Local Singaporean Voice.

“While NCS has the deep expertise in AI to create neural models for high-quality voice synthesis, compared to the engineering effort required to serve the models in a reliable and scalable manner, this was relatively the easier part. With the support of the NVIDIA team, we were able to achieve the right latency and throughput using NVIDIA® Riva.”

Sunil Sivadas
Practice Lead, Next-Gen Tech, NCS