Human language technologies and Affan Oromo

This paper deals with Afaan Oromo, a Cushitic languages family which cover approximately 34.49% of the Ethiopia's population, pertinent to the language processing and speech technology with an overview of the attempts made on Afaan Oromo with respect to natural language processing; which include part of speech tagging, grammar checker, Parser and speech technology such as speech recognition and text to speech synthesis with the performance evaluation for few of them. The paper specially deals with the current state of Text-to-Speech Synthesis through addressing the different Text-to-speech synthesis approaches existing before and after the ‘90s pinpointing their advantages and disadvantages. Although the main focus of the paper is Afaan Oromo, it also briefly reviews the current progress of the language processing and speech technology potentials for Ethiopian languages.