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Date:      Fri, 07 Feb 1997 10:22:16 +1000
From:      Stephen Hocking <sysseh@devetir.qld.gov.au>
To:        multimedia@freebsd.org
Subject:   Excellent quality speech synthesiser - runs under FreeBSD! (fwd)
Message-ID:  <199702070022.AAA01336@netfl15a.devetir.qld.gov.au>

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Have a gander at this - it sounds rather good and interfaces to VoxWare & NAS.


	Stephen
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From: Alan W Black <awb@cstr.ed.ac.uk>
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Date: Wed, 5 Feb 1997 17:16:54 GMT
Message-Id: <199702051716.RAA24297@margo>
To: synth@cs.bham.ac.uk
Subject: Announcing The Festival Speech Synthesis System



        The Festival Speech Synthesis System version 1.1.1 Beta
                Centre for Speech Technology Research                 
                     University of Edinburgh, UK                      
                       Copyright (c) 1996,1997                           
                        All Rights Reserved.

We are pleased to announce the release of version 1.1.1 of Festival.
Festival offers a general framework for building speech synthesis
systems as well as including examples of various modules.  As a whole
it offers full text to speech through a number APIs: from shell level,
though a Scheme command interpreter, as a C++ library, client/server
mores and an Emacs interface.  Festival is multi-lingual (currently
English, Welsh and Spanish) though English is the most advanced.

The system is written in C++ and uses the Edinburgh Speech Tools
Library for low level architecture and has a Scheme (SIOD) based
command interpreter for control.  Documentation is given in the FSF
texinfo format which can generate, a printed manual, info files and
HTML.

NOTE: Festival is a young system and constantly being developed,
this release is not a final polished system and although it has
been checked on many systems, it should still be consider BETA
quality code.

This distribution includes:
   * Full English text to speech
   * Full C++ source for modules, SIOD interpreter, and Scheme library
   * Lexicon based on OALD (distributed with permission)
   * Edinburgh Speech Tools, low level C++ library
   * British English diphone database (for residual LPC resynthesis)
       (8k (2.3M) and 16k (8.5M) versions of the database are included)
   * Full documentation (html, postscript and GNU info format)

Festival version 1.1.1 Beta is available by anonymous ftp from
    ftp://ftp.cstr.ed.ac.uk/pub/festival/1.1.1/
And through the Festival Download Page
    http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/download.html

The Festival home page, offering descriptions of the system, examples
and online demos, can be found at
    http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival.html

Requirements

To run Festival you need:
   * A Unix machine, Festival has compiled and run on Suns (SunOS and 
     Solaris), FreeBSD, Linux, SGIs and DEC Alphas but should be portable
     to any standard Unix machine.
   * GNU C++ version 2.7.2 or 2.6.3
   * GNU Make any recent version
   * Audio hardware, /dev/audio (Suns, Linux and FreeBSD) and NCD's NAS 
     network transparent audio system are supported directly but 
     Festival supports the execution of any Unix command that can 
     play audio files.
   * GNU readline library is recommended though not necessary

Restrictions

The system is made available for free for research, educational and
individual use only, for commercial licencing please contact the
authors.

Unlike previous versions this version may be redistributed for
non-commercial use.  If you wish to use it in a commercial system you
should contact us first.  Research distributions, e.g. bundled with
other systems, are allowed.  Commercial unmodified re-distributions
(e.g. on CDROM with collections of other software) are not permitted
but will probably be permitted for free if you ask.  We do intend that
later versions may be distributed of such CDROMs without requiring
permission but until we have a more stable system we'd like to control
that.

NEWS

Since our last release (1.0.0 Nov) Festival has had the following
enhancements

- -- A new set of (distributable) diphones (roger)
- -- BSD socket client/server support
- -- A start at programmable text modes for mode specific processing
- -- Fully programmable (rule-based) intonation module
- -- Tokenizations now externally controlled, and improved
- -- Better Scheme i/o (a format function and pretty printer)
- -- Externally specified utterance end, (and better definition)
- -- Many little (and important) bugs fixed (thanks beta testers)
- -- Documentation overhaul

FUTURE

The new diphone set still requires more work and we are likely to
release frequent updates to it.

Thank you for your interest in our work

Alan W Black
24th January 1997

Alan W Black                            email: awb@cstr.ed.ac.uk
Centre for Speech Technology Research   http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/~awb
University of Edinburgh                 tel:   (44) 131 650 2787
80 South Bridge, Edinburgh, UK          fax:   (44) 131 650 6351




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