Graphical abstract Abstract This paper presents a fast adaptation technique to build a hidden Markov model (HMM) based dialectal speech synthesis acoustic model. Standard Malay is used as a source language whereas Kelantanese Malay is chosen to be target language in this study. Kelantan dialect is a Malay dialect from the northeast of Peninsular Malaysia. One of the most important steps and time consuming in building a HMM acoustic model is the alignment of speech sound. A good alignment will

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... oduce a clear and natural synthesize speech. The importance of this study is to propose a quick approach for aligning and building a good dialectal speech synthesis acoustic model by using a different source acoustic model. There are two proposed adaptation approaches in this study to synthesize dialectal Malay sentences using different amount of target speech and a source acoustic model to build the target acoustic model of speech synthesis system. From the results, we found out that the dialectal speech synthesis system built with adaptation approaches are much better in term of speech quality compared to the one without applying adaptation approach.