News from the MBROLA Project Below is a detailed account of the information sent to mbrola users registered on the mbrola-users mailing list.   12/2005 ......Winter-2005 release.... Dear Mbrola users, New Mbrola databases are available please refresh the download page on your browser 1) IC1, an Icelandic male voice, thanks to Björn Kristinsson 2) DE8, a German male voice , thanks to Markus Binsteiner 3) MA1, a Malay female voice , thanks to Kow Weng Onn 4) HB2, a Hebrew female voice , thanks to Esther Raizen On-going databases: canadian english, hungarian, latin, romanian ------------------------------------------------------------- NEW BINARIES 1)Mbrola-dos debugged and recompiled for FreeTTS, thanks to Jianmin Li 2)Binary for IPAQ-strongarm, thanks to Sébastien Randoux 3)New version of Mbrola Tools for windows, thanks to Alain Ruelle. New features available: - Mbrplay.dll : Event synchronization with the audio output. So callback messages can be sent on each phoneme event. The pho files may also contain additional event signalization like word, sentence, paragraph, or custom. - Mbroli.exe : integration of the eFriend (talking face) - if installed -, available for all the databases of mbrola. 4)The first release of the MaxMBROLA, thanks to Nicolas D'Alessandro. This package is a MBROLA-based real-time speech synthetizer developped for Max/MSP 4.5 (Mac OS X and Windows XP versions).It contains : - the MaxMBROLA~ external object, allowing TTS (Text-to-Speech) in Max/MSP; - the midiMBROLA~ patch, a "plug-an-play" keyboard-based version of the speech synthetizer; - help files; - phonetic text and voice database samples." ------------------------------------------------------------- TEXT TO SPEECH TOOLS AND DEMOS Page updated. Please refer to http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/mbrola/mbrtts.html for downloads. Venezualan spanish: by Manuel Rodriguez, Alistair Conkie French: by Hélène Collavizza and Jean-Paul Stromboni New version of LIA_PHON by Frederic Bechet Wavesurfer plugin by Dimitrios Zachariadis ------------------------------------------------------------- HAPPY 2005! Baris Bozkurt, for the Mbrola Team, 16/12/04   04/2004 ......Spring-2004 release.... Dear Mbrola users, It has been a long time since the last news was sent. Mbrola was a bit unlucky in 2004, with hacks, various network problems... and due to my visit to Limsi-CNRS/Paris, Mbrola processing was disabled for about 8 months. Finally, we are back with full capacity! Here is a list of databases made available on the Mbrola project since the last mbrola-news has been sent. Main Mbrola Project Page: http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/mbrola.html 1) DE7, a German female voice at three voice qualities (modal, soft and loud), thanks to Marc Schroeder 2) LT1, a Lithuanian male voice , thanks to Pijus Kasparaitis 3) LT2, a Lithuanian male voice , thanks to Pijus Kasparaitis 4) CA2, a Canadian-French male voice , thanks to François Lanctôt and Claude Chapleau 5) IR1, an Iranian male voice , thanks to Alireza Farhadi 6) VZ1, a Venezuelan Spanish male, thanks to Manuel Rodriguez Hourcadette 7) AF1, an Afrikaans male voice , thanks to Daan Wissing A total of 65 voices on the mbrola page! On-going databases: canadian english, hebrew, greek, indonesian, romanian, icelandic, german ------------------------------------------------------------- NEW BINARIES Lib version for macOSX , thanks to Raphael Sebbe Binary for symbian , thanks to Ivan Stojic Linux binary for ppc, thanks to Kai Ruemmler Linux binary for z80, thanks to Roberto E. Vargas Caballero ------------------------------------------------------------- TEXT TO SPEECH TOOLS AND DEMOS Page updated Please refer to http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/mbrola/mbrtts.html for downloads. ------------------------------------------------------------- Baris Bozkurt, for the Mbrola Team, 29/04/04   11/2002 ......AUTUMN release.... Dear Mbrola users, New languages available, please refresh the download page on your browser: Main Mbrola Project Page: http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/mbrola.html 1) DE4 a German Male voice(including English and French phones), thanks to the IMS team, University of Stuttgart 2) DE5 a German Female voice, thanks to Fred Englert 3) DE6 a German Male voice at three voice qualities (modal, soft and loud), thanks to Marc Schroeder 4) JP2 a Japanese Female voice , thanks to Tomohisa Tachiki 5) JP3 a Japanese Female voice , thanks to Yoram Meron 6) PL1 a Polish Female voice , thanks to Krzysztof Szklanny 7) ES4 a Spanish Male voice , thanks to César González Ferreras 8) CA1 a Canadian French Male voice , thanks to Vincent ARNAUD, Lucie MÉNARD and Johanna-Pascale ROY A total of 58 voices on the mbrola page! ------------------------------------------------------------- NEW BINARIES Mbrola instalation package for Debian, thanks to Ramses Rodriguez Mbrola for cygwin, thanks to Albert Russel Plankton Mbrola for Mac OSX, thanks to Raphael Sebbe ------------------------------------------------------------- TEXT TO SPEECH TOOLS AND DEMOS Page updated Please refer to http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/mbrola/mbrtts.html for downloads. ------------------------------------------------------------- Baris Bozkurt, for the Mbrola Team, 26/11/02 02/2002 ......Winter release.... Dear Mbrola users, New languages available, please refresh the download page on your browser: Main Mbrola Project Page: http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/mbrola.html 1) IT4 an Italian female voice, thanks to Fabio Tesser 2) TL1 a Telugu(Andhra) female voice, thanks to Kalpana Reddy K.V.Kkalpana 3) SW2 a Swedish female voice, thanks to Adina Svensson A total of 50 voices on the mbrola page! ------------------------------------------------------------- NEW BINARIES Mbrola for linux, thanks to Stephen Isard Mbrola for native dos uuencoded, thanks to Donato Taddei ------------------------------------------------------------- TEXT TO SPEECH TOOLS LIA_PHON text processing tools for french, thanks to Frederic Bechet Please refer to http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/mbrola/mbrtts.html for download. ------------------------------------------------------------- Long live the MBROLA project, Baris Bozkurt, for the Mbrola Team   06/2001.... Summer release ....   Dear Mbrola users, New languages available(though some of them are 2-3 months old), please refresh the download page on your browser: 1) GR2, a Greek male voice, thanks to Gerasimos Xydas 2) IT3, an Italian male voice thanks to Piero Cosi 3) TR2, a Turkish female voice created at TCTS Lab by Baris Bozkurt 4) FR6, a french male voice created at TCTS Lab by Xavier Ricco 5) FR7, a french belgian voice created at TCTS Lab by Alain Ruelle ------------------------------------------------------------------------ COMING SOON New databases on process: SHL1(Sinhala male), TL1(Telugu female), JP2(Japanese female) NU-MBROLA : New MBROLA version for non-uniform-units based synthesis ------------------------------------------------------------------------ NEW BINARIES mbrola-linux-strongarm mbroliX-MacOSX compiled by Raphael Sebbe mbroliX-SuSelinux-ultra1 compiled by Matthias Nutt ------------------------------------------------------------------------ A total of 47 voices (24 different languages) on the mbrola page! Long live the MBROLA project, Baris Bozkurt 02/2001.... MBROLA is 5 YEARS OLD !!! .... For those of you who already miss the "Happy New Year" greetings we all have sent/received in the last few weeks, here are greeting from the MBROLA CHOIR, which we produced for the 5th anniversary of the MBROLA project : http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/mbrola/xmas.mp3 Dear Mbrola users, New languages available, please refresh the download page on your browser: 1) IN1 an Hindi male voice thanks to Jaideep Vaidya 2) IN2 an Hindi female voice thanks to Jaideep Vaidya 3) IT1 an Italian male voice created at TCTS Lab by Claudia Citta 3) IT2 an Italian female voice created at TCTS Lab by Claudia Citta A total of 42 voices (24 different languages) on the mbrola page! ------------------------------------------------------------ UPDATED LANGUAGES 1) NL3 Dutch female voice, new release by Raymond Veldhuis ------------------------------------------------------------- COMING SOON New databases on process: TR2(Turkish female), GR2(Greek male), SN1(Sinhala male) ------------------------------------------------------------- CALL FOR ANNOUNCEMENTS A new web page with title "What People Do With Mbrola" is planned to be created. This page will include announcements (and links) of various kinds of Mbrola applications. If you want to announce your applications, products, etc... please send a message to Baris Bozkurt Here is the first announcement; We are pleased to announce that popular book 'Underground'(by Suelette Dreyfus & Julian Assange)(http://www.underground-book.com) has been rendered in full by Festival with OGI hacks to the RAB diphone set and is available as 250Mb of 32kbps MP3's. http://www.underground-book.com/download.php3 ------------------------------------------------------------- CALL FOR MBRDICO DICTIONARIES As we all know, Mbrola is not a TTS but rather phonemes+prosody to speech. This characteristic makes it difficult to use all of the databases of Mbrola directly. Upto now, for the grapheme to phonetic transcription, we have built resources for Arabic, British English, French, Spanish, Dutch and Turkish. We want to create text-to-phonetics tools for other languages which appear on the Mbrola download page. We have a generic tool, ID3 software which can build a text-to-phonetic resource from a list of words and their transcriptions. Those resources can be used in the MBRDICO software and could also be integrated easily in Euler, to create a rude TTS( with constant prosody ). If you have such a list that you want to share with us to build the resources, please send a message to Baris Bozkurt ------------------------------------------------------------- NEW MAILING LIST FOR EULER USERS (euler-interest@tcts.fpms.ac.be) A forum for EULER user's questions and issues. To subscribe, send an email to euler-interest-request@tcts.fpms.ac.be with the word 'subscribe' in either the header or the main text. To unsubscribe, just send another mail to the same address with 'unsubscribe'. ------------------------------------------------------------- Long live the MBROLA project Baris Bozkurt, for the Mbrola Team   10/2000.......Autumn Release....... Dear Mbrola users, New languages available, please refresh the download page on your browser: 1) AR2 an Arabic male voice thanks to Abdel Muez Abukhalaf 2) ID1 an Indonesian male voice thanks to Arry Akhmad Arman 3) TR1 a Turkish male voice created at TCTS Lab by Baris Bozkurt A total of 36 voices (22 different languages) on the mbrola page! ------------------------------------------------------------ UPDATED LANGUAGES 1) CZ2 Czech male voice, new release by Ales Horak, Mikulas Pinos and Pavel Smrz ------------------------------------------------------------- Long live the MBROLA project Baris Bozkurt, for the first time for the Mbrola Team   Mons July 19th, 2000 ... Miroir, mon beau miroir .... Dear Mbrola users, Here are some "just before hollidays" news from the mbrola project: -New mirrors and mirroring molicy -Databases in preparation... -Open position: looking for a group leader in speech processing 1. New Mirrors and mirroring policy =================================== People trying to reach our primary web site may have experienced download problems recently. This is due to a complete change in the organization of our university network. We are very sorry about it, and make our best to solve problems. In order to avoid unpleasant download problems, however, we have decided to establish complete WWW mirrors (as opposed to partial ftp mirrors in the past). Current MBROLA WWW mirrors are : + NEW (and automatically synchronized)!!! : FESTVOX (CMU, Pittsburgh, US) http://www.festvox.org/mbrola/ + TCTS Lab (Mons, BE) http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/mbrola/ + MAMBO (UCSC, Santa Cruz, US) http://mambo.ucsc.edu/psl/mbrola/ See http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/ (and follow the "mirrors" link for more info) 2. Databases in preparation... ============================== Coming very soon : cz2, a new Czech database (male voice) provided by Ales Horak, Mikulas Pinos, and Pavel Smrz, from Natural Language Processing Laboratory, Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, Brno. nz1 (Maori), in2 (Hindi), co1 (Columbian Spanish) 3. Open position: group leader in speech processing =================================================== MBROLA, as well as other R&D projects in speech synthesis and recognition (see http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/research.html), is now maintained by MULTITEL, an independent research intitute associated to the Faculté Polytechnique de Mons to promote Multimedia and Telecommunications research in Wallonia. MULTITEL is now actively looking for a senior (PhD) researcher with experience in speech and/or language processing, to lead its speech research activities, in collaboration with Prof. T. Dutoit. Previous experience in group leading is an advantage. For more information, see http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/vacancies.html or contact : Prof. Thierry Dutoit Ph: +32 65 374774 Faculte Polytechnique de Mons Fax: +32 65 374729 MULTITEL-TCTS Lab, http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/~dutoit Avenue Copernic, B-7000 Mons, Belgium   ================================================================= Stay tuned! The Mbrola Team 05/05/00....Spring release.... Dear Mbrola users, it's seems the rhythm of this newsletter is going quarterly (the last one was in October). New languages available, please refresh the download page on your browser: 1) BR2 a Brazilian Portuguese male voice thanks to Denis R. Costa at MicroPower 2) BR3 a Brazilian Portuguese female voice thanks to Denis R. Costa at MicroPower 3) DE3 a German female voice (top quality at 22050Hz) is released thanks to ATIP GbR (http://www.atip.de) 4) HB1 an Hebrew male voice ("Ashkenazi" accent) is released thanks to Yoram Meron 5) JP1 a Japanese male voice released thanks to Yoram 6) PT1 a European Portuguese female voice, thanks to Babel Technologies SA A total of 31 voices on the mbrola page! ------------------------------------------------------------ UPDATED LANGUAGES 1) EE1 Estonian male voice, new release by Einar Meister 2) GR1 Greek male voice, new release by Aggelos Bletsas and Dr George Sergiadis ------------------------------------------------------------- NEW BINARIES mbrola302a is looming ahead on many platforms. Less bugs, more robustness, but no new feature. All MBROLA executables are now mirrored at http://mambo.ucsc.edu/psl/mbrola/bin The MBROLA dowload page (http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/mbrcopybin.html) has been updated to let mbrola users download from this mirror ------------------------------------------------------------- TTS New version of MBRDICO000328: quite a better French, quite a better British English. New TTS in French and English for MACINTOSH by T. Gueslin MINGUS : MINGUS (Intonation Generation Using Syntax) is a French TTS written in Prolog by Piet Mertens (University of Leuven) : See the MINGUS Web Page : http://bach.arts.kuleuven.ac.be/pmertens/prosody/mingus.html. As always, download everything on http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis For myself (the guy with yellow scarfs and red T-shirt), I have been working for 4 years in the frame of the MBROLA project, I am now leaving for another job. It was really exciting to serve you and host so many new languages here, as well as providing some GPL code with nice people at CMU. From now on, I will be advantageously replaced by master Thierry Dutoit himself. Long live the MBROLA project Vincent Pagel, one last time for the Mbrola Team 10/10/99.... A long time ago in a remote country .... Dear Mbrola users, it's been a long time since we'd announce anything. Yes, we've nearly been idling all this time. Mbrola is back on the track, here is the huge distribution: 1) Korean (Hanmal language) is available on our site, thanks to the work of Prof. Gim Gyeongseog, Kim Kyongsok and Mr. Chung Hyunsong. 2) Czech is now available thanks to Ales Horak, Mikulas Pinos and Pavel Smrz 3) A somptuous French Female voice (FR4) is available thanks to Vincent Pagel and Babeltech. The 22050 sampling rate is a must. 4) Yet another French male voice (FR5). Some of you will recognize Fabrice Malrere's Belgian accent (the author of MBROLIGN). 4) New mbrola binaries: OpendBSD for Sparc, FreeBSD 2.x (a.out) + FreeBSD 3.x (ELF) gently provided by Miod Vallat Stay tuned The Mbrola Team 05/05/99....Festival worked for you this month .... Dear Mbrola users, 1) The Macintosh Mbrolayou were longing to get is available. Free    gift a French TTS for the written in C++ by Philippe Devallois and    documented by Thibault Gueslin ... and a Macintosh dedicated web    page :          http://www.multimania.com/thybe/MBROLA-MAC 2) Alan Black designed a Festival Package for US1 US2 and US3:    ftp://ftp.cstr.ed.ac.uk/pub/festival/1.3.1/festvox_us1.tar.gz    ftp://ftp.cstr.ed.ac.uk/pub/festival/1.3.1/festvox_us2.tar.gz    ftp://ftp.cstr.ed.ac.uk/pub/festival/1.3.1/festvox_us3.tar.gz         When running festival, typing (voice_us1_mbrola) will plug         that friendly American female voice we made. 3) NetBSD Festival / Mbrola package by Julian Assange. Availale at:           ftp://suburbia.net/pub/proff/festival.tgz 4) MBRDICO990503 is available !!! Spanish, Dutch (Fabrice Malfrère),    Arabic (Nawfal Tounsi), French and American (Vincent Pagel). Also    provide a new phonetizer training strategy with the ID3 package,    which was applied on French and American English for still better    accuracy ( first release of French was really bad, I apologize for    that).                         http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/mbrdico 09/03/99....worked for you this month .... Dear Mbrola users, 1) FR3 a French male voice... actually it's mine :-) 2) New release of http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/mbrdico it's    smaller and faster, speaks basic American and now speaks a correct    French:         "les poules du couvent couvent leurs oeufs"     (the hen of the monastry are        sitting on their eggs)    Sources in C++ distributed under Gnu Public license   03/02/1999.... late late late, but worth it .... Dear Mbrola users, NEW DATABASES: 1) EE1: Estonian male database provided by Einar Meister 2) MX1 Mexican Spanish database, and    US3 and American Male voice, many thanks to Mike Macon and Johan    Wouters from the Center for Spoken Language Understanding (CSLU),    USA and Alejandro Barbosa at UDLA, Mexico 3) DE2 and FR1 have been updated for enhanced quality Just give a look at the mbrola home page ... can you name all those flags? BINARIES: At last a shared lib for Macintosh is available. Compiled for PowerPC 604e (PowerMac 8600,9600 ...). Will be ported to Macs 68k. Many thanks to Philippe Devallois for his remarkable porting! Macintosh afficionados have their own Mbrola site:                          http://www.multimania.com/thybe/MBROLA-MAC FULL TTS: TexTalk, a new mbrola-based English TTS with sources in C++ is available on the full TTS page. Thanks to Benjamin Wooler from Univiversity of Queensland! NEW PROJECT : MBRDICO         http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/mbrdico MBRDICO is letter to phoneme converter using MBROLA as a back-end speech synthesizer. Text processing is performed using a complete GNU GPL package for machine learning of Phonetization (letter/phoneme alignement, decision tree building, stress assignment). A minimal module for duration/intonation generation is provided. MBRDICO speaks Arabic, French and US English, compiles on Windows VISUALC++ and UNIX+gcc environments. This work is the result of a collaboration between :      Faculté Polytechnique de Mons      Carnegie Mellon University      University of Edinburgh Many thanks to Vincent Pagel, Nawfal Tounsi, Alan Black and Kevin Lenzo. 03/11/98.... Going south .... DATABASES: 1) AR1: Nawfal Tounsi, an enthousiastic collaborator at TCTS LAB has just finished AR1, an Arabic male voice for MBROLA. Literary Arabic can be synthesized with this database, and other Arabic Dialects such as Morocan are possible as well. 2) ES2: a new Spanish database provided by TCC Communications CORP BINARIES : 3) QNX Mbrola binary: QNX platform enter the game thanks to Thomas Fletcher. 4) Linux Mbrola binary: A static binary is available for Linux (3.01g1) because some of you complained of libraries incompatibilities. UPDATE: in release 3.01g1 I forgot to include Signal Handling capabilities, it's now repaired sorry for those of you who develop Emacs Speak. MBROLA RELEASE : 5) New features in Mbrola 3.01g (give an eye to the updated readme.txt):   05/10/98 3.01f : in the Windows DLL, add initSized_Phone to avoid multiple realloc on each appendf0 (generally the number of pitch points is known from the start)   20/10/09 3.01g : Mainly for people using Festival, give the possibility to move the command line parameters into an initialization file compatible with .set files. Correct a bug with flush_MBR for people using renamings. FULL TTS : 6) Festival Users: the linux binary now comes with a special note and package to help you install the magic Festival TTS. 7) The W project was initiated by Thierry Dutoit and Nawfal Tounsi, it aims  at   providing   programs which   helps  persons,   with  spoken disabililities, type faster, and automatically utter the words as soon as they have been  typed. QUESTION: How  to use speech synthetizer  in real time  knowing  that the time we  take  to  write  a text   on the keyboard is  much  longer than  the  time we  need   to tell it?  Many solutions were tested,  and the most   appropriate we found is  to let users abridge the most frequent words (a kind of bijective Morse code at   the  word  level).  Most   blind   persons actually   use such  a standardized langage,   called  Braille grade   II which  can  also be written with romanian alphabet. This langage  was designed to increase the speed of writing  and reading Braille  texts. Some examples of the contractions are shown below: like  l                       rather  r                   about  ab                 afternoon   afn A French version called Wfrench is available, source code is provided, it can easily be adapted to other langages. Visit our website on : http://www.tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/w/english 18/09/98  .... Mozilla is back .... To help you surf with our databases we have included an inception date in their names. It's particularly usefull because our miror sites or CDROMs are not allways synchronized with the Belgian primary site.   GR1 a Greek male voice provided by Aggelos Bletsas and Dr George Sergiadis from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki   a rebuild of FR2 a French female voice at 22050Khz, enhance the quality   US2 an American English Male voice provided by Babel Technologies. This voice introduce a new allophone /Or/ (an /O/ in /r/ context like in "sort").   The release of Mbrola 3.01d, the code has undergone a complete relifting, and it has visible effects for end-users. New features:   Windows DLL -> the annoying License message bothers you as little as possible. It appears only ONCE in your whole session, and you just have to press enter to make it disapear (no slipy yes/no buttons).   Forget old limitations with the number of pitch points per phoneme... use as many pitch points as you need (especially usefull for singing Mbrolas).   You can forget the pitch point requirements as well ( previously you could not send more than 250 phonemes w/o pitch points ). Well, it doesn't make much sense to play flat speech, though it may be usefull for debugging your application.   No more lower pitch limitation, you can generate vocal fry and deep smoker voices   Volume Control Phoneme cloning and renaming. The first possibility allows you to virtually map any phoneme set into any other and thus easily plug any Natural Language Processing module into any Mbrola database (well nearly any :-). You can even make some cross-language synthesis. rebirth of full ascending compatibility (there was a flaw with databases older than 2.04)   More precise timing -> the size of the audio file you get is correct (previously you had to insert a 0ms silence at the end of the pho file)   We have bought Purify from Pure software, and the code should be more leak-free than ever.   Signal handling on Unix (to stop playback and reset the synth as requested by EmacsSpeak users )   Windows DLL -> you can directly connect your TTS to the synthesis engine with the new SetParser function. MBROLI -> the PHO player for Windows takes advantage of the new features of the DLL. This program comes with the PCWIN version of mbrola. The DLL and MBRPLAY now come with a lot of programming examples in C++ and visual Basic (see below)!!   MBREDIT -> another PHO player written by O. PLatteau, coming with source code in Visual Basic. 10/07/98... The French had a mbrola synth, the Croatian had not .... (football match between France and Croatia) CR1, a Croatian diphone database is available thanks to the work of Juraj Bakran and Nikolaj Lazic of the Department of Phonetics at University of Zagreb. Mbrola 3.00 is now available for Mac users. Get it from the mbrola download page: http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/mbrcopybin.html Project W is here at last...  http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/w/ The W project aims at creating a fast computer keyboard driver for people with speech disabilities. The related software is based on grade II Braille languages developed by blind people associations all over the world and minimizes the number of keystrokes to utter a word (the name of the project is the grade II abreviation for "word" in English). In combination with the MBROLA project, W could put words in the mouth of thousands of users, in tens of languages. 23/06/98: .... Du lyssnar på Lukas, en svensk talsyntes .... SW1, a swedish diphone database is available thanks to the diphones of Marcus Filipsson and Gösta Bruce of the Department of Linguistics and Phonetics of Lund University, Sweden.   Estonian, Greek, and Croatian are on their way.   A German TTS for WINDOWS by Thomas Portele: http://www.ikp.uni-bonn.de/~tpo/HADIFIXforMBROLA.html   wxTTS 1.0, a British English TTS for Windows thanks to Julian Smart who has ported Isard&Conkie's FreeSpeech. His encapsulation work will facilitate the integration of TTS in you apps : http://web.ukonline.co.uk/julian.smart/code.html   The visible part of the iceberg may be small for you, but Mbrola software is undertaking a complete revamping so that you will have more control on it. It explains we've been slow to issue compressed databases. BY PUBLIC DEMAND, we have decided to replace the pop-up window by a non-blocking auto-dissolving banner for the Windows DLL. It was too impeding, mostly for blind users and for keyboard-free computers. Next release is planned for mid-August. 02/03/98: .... Melting like snow in the sun .... Mbrola for Bebox platforms is coming back, hope the few happy users will enjoy   The Mbrola 3.00 release to come is a must: many users complained about downloading times, and most people were reluctant to download all the available databases (not to mention the complaints of sysops around the world running the swelling Mbrola miror sites). So we have decided here to release on the WWW our real-time decompression scheme ! As a consequence your favorite databases will take about 1/5 as much room as previously. The avalability of those databases will be announced next month :-)'   Thierry Dutoit becomes a TV star on March 17th at 21h15 on RTBF1, the national public TV channel in Belgium. See him explain in this scientific broadcast all you ever wanted to know about speech without even daring ask, and get a glimpse of the Mbrola Team. Then the big news of the month, special issue of the Windows package: thanks to Alain Ruelle, you lucky users can download the autodecompressing-autoinstalling MbrolaTools300.exe from the Mbrola download page. 16/02/98: .... No news, good news .... American English diphone database us1 release 2.063 is available -> the diphone matrix we provide is now fully completed. Among the 45^2= 2025 diphones provided you'll find of course some nice oddities such as the N-N diphone :-) A new port: thanks to Gary Thomas a Linux Power PC binary of Mbrola is now available. 25/12/97: .... Stars and Stripes .... An American English diphone database available thanks to Babel Technologies   New feature of Mbrola 2.06a : sound quality enhancement 04/12/97: .... MAC Attacks, and a TTS blossom .... THE LONG AWAITED MBROLA BINARY FOR MAC IS HERE THANKS TO GERALD KERMA!   Freespeech: A full TTS in English provided by Stephen Isard and Alistair Conkie from CSTR Edimburgh is distributed as C source code   Full TTS in German provided by Thomas Portele et Al   New features of Mbrola 2.05d : param -i, flag -e 20/10/97... The windows DLL and voice quality... Mbrola 2.05a now lets you change the LENGTH of the vocal tract just like in the old LPC speech synthesizers   THE LONG AWAITED DLL FOR WINDOWS IS RELEASED AT LAST   DE2 a German male   FR1 release 2.050, complete diphone set (full matrix)   A neat :-) WWW site 11/06/97.... Female voice .... Fr2 a French female voice (thanks to Céline Egéa and Vincent Pagel)   Mbrola 2.04a binary 11/06/97... Spanish release .... New release of the german female voice de1   Spanish TTS written in PERL by Alistair Conkie. 24/04/97... Historic Book ... After three long years of hard writing, a lot of sweat, and very fruitful interactions with reviewers, the book "An Introduction to Text-to-Speech Synthesis", by Thierry Dutoit, is finally out! An Introduction to Text-to-Speech Synthesis is a comprehensive introduction to the subject. The author treats two areas of speech synthesis: Part I of the book concerns natural language processing and the inherent problems it presents for speech synthesis; Part II focuses on digital signal processing, with an emphasis on the concatenative approach. Both parts of the text guide the reader through the material in a step-by-step easy-to-follow way. This is the first book to treat the topic of speech synthesis from the perspective of two different engineering approaches. The book will be of interest to researchers and students in phonetics and speech communication, in both academia and industry. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht Hardbound, ISBN 0-7923-4498-7 April 1997, 312 pp. NLG 170.00 / USD 99.00 / GBP 63.00 See http://kapis.www.wkap.nl/kapis/CGI-BIN/WORLD/book.htm?0-7923-4498-7 18/03/97: Historic release: The way for the long awaited British English database is available at last thanks to Alan Black / Edimburgh   NEW MIROR SITE: available at the University of California - Santa Cruz thank to Michael M. Cohen.   PC BINARY: After some archeological work I've exhumed an old 16bit compiler for windows, and I hope this will solve some of the problems some of you have experienced recently.   Tgz compression scheme is dropped: back to zip 21/02/97:  let's welcome a new language in the club of the MBROLA speech databases. Denis Costa has carried out an excellent work with a Brazilian Portuguese male voice. Listen to the audio demo and download br1.zip. The 2.03d release prepare the way for the long awaited British English database which should be issued soon. Among other things : it corrects some bugs and adds some new exciting ones :-)   it includes a Volume_ratio parameter   correct a bug with the Flush command (was ineffective)   allows a festival like pitch point marking, i.e. between ()s   and above all, allows phoneme renaming tables ! (you specify a new writing for a phoneme, this writing can be as long as you want, and of course helps if you are not SAMPA compatible). 28/01/97: .... more fun .... New NLP tools officially released for your listening pleasure: Alistair Conkie and David Haubensack have granted us a PERL script which allows tiny NLP in English and French. Check in the TOOL item. Great for the price :-)   Second : nl2 a COMPLETE Dutch diphone database provided by Arthur Dirksen and Ludmila Menert, Utrecht. Still an astounding quality, a must even if you don't speak a word of Dutch. Though we will keep on distributing the original reduced nl1 database as it is quite small (400Kb), which is an interesting starting point for those who want to quickly test MBROLA. 19/11/96: ... more languages .... New languages officially released ! You can now enjoy the fluidity of MBROLA speech in German (female voice), Spanish (male voice), Romanian (male voice) and Dutch (male voice). The corresponding MBROLA diphone databases (de1, es1, ro1, and nl1, respectively) are available here MBROLA Copy Page.   20/09/96: Mbrola V2.02a is available ...from the MBROLA Copy Page. Official version for the ICSLP96 Philadelphia presentation. Enhancements : More robustness :-)   Check for saturation   Blast the pitch limits. Don't complain if the voice sounds strange when pitched at 600Hz   Since there is no pitch limit, pitches are now floats (accuracy to stay in tuned when singing) 26/08/96: Mbrola V2.01d is available ....from the MBROLA Copy Page . Enhancements: More robustness   Most of all, can cope with the German database to come :-) 26/06/96: Mbrola V2.01a is available ...from the MBROLA Copy Page . Enhancements: the possibility to indicate the Time or Frequency ratios by adding special comment lines in the .pho files ( "; T=0.7" or "; F = 1.3" )   Resolve a bug with the last pitch point of the stream   More robustness 20/04/96: Mbrola V2.00b is available! Many enhancements: One and only one diphone database for all architectures   Many output audio file formats added ( RIFFwav, au, aiff, raw )   Now skips empty lines (caused bugs on PC when file ends with CR)   Enhancement of unvoiced phone quality   Now uses SAMPA phonetic alphabet   Speed enhancement, others to come   18/01/96: Mbrola V1.02 is now available ....for SGI Indy's running IRIX 5.3. It is available from the MBROLA Copy Page A new Windows version of Mbrola V1.02 is now available, which directly outputs .wav files. It is available from the MBROLA Copy Page . Please notice that the .wav format should be explicitely mentioned in the command line : mbrola fr1-pc input.pho output.wav Some first new .pho files are available (quite impressive : mbrola now sings Trenet ! Thank you, Vincent). See the MBROLA Copy Page   17/01/96: Mbrola V1.02 is now available ....for NEXT/NEXTSTEP. The executable file was compiled for both MOTOROLA and INTEL-based machines. It is available from the MBROLA Copy Page . We have fixed a problem which arised when using the playsnd utility supplied in the utility.zip file : It was said in the readme.txt file supplied with mbrola that playsnd would accept an input pipe when used with "-" as argument, while the actual version of playsnd accepted an input pipe when no argument was passed. The new version of playsnd accepts "-" as an input pipe. Eventually, we have corrected some problems in the fr1.txt and fr1-pc.txt file. Phonetic characters had been transcribed with the ANSI format, which led to problems with diacritics. We now use the ASCII format.   08/12/95: A project in march The MBROLA project was officially launched this afternoon. As a first trial, and since the mirror site at Berkeley is not available yet, it was announced on French newsgroups.   Last updated November 26th,2002, send comments to Mbrola Team