Fw: New Java-based software speech synthesizer available

Fw: New Java-based software speech synthesizer available

[David Poehlman]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Steve Pattison" <srp@bigpond.net.au>
To: "GUI Talk" <gui-talk@nfbnet.org>
Sent: Thursday, December 20, 2001 3:34 AM
Subject: Fwd: New Java-based software speech synthesizer available


From: mark muscat mmuscat@bigpond.net.au
To: vip-l@softspeak.com.au

Hello people,

this is a message that was sent to the java accessibility list and is
about
a software speach synthesizer  and TTS (text to speech) system that is
written in java and mentions the speech API (application Interface)
1.0.
This is mainly aimed for Linux users, but may have some interesting
offshoots for the ms environment or any other platform.
Mark Muscat

 From: Willie Walker william.walker@SUN.COM
 To: JAVA-ACCESS@JAVA.SUN.COM

 Greetings!

 It is my pleasure to announce that the Sun Microsystems Laboratories
 Speech Group has made its FreeTTS (http://freetts.sourceforge.net/)
 speech synthesis engine available via open source through a BSD-style
 license.  The engine is written entirely in the Java(tm) programming
 language and provides partial support for the synthesis portion
 of the Java Speech API 1.0 specification.

 You can read more about this project in an article on
http://java.sun.com:

     http://java.sun.com/features/2001/12/flite.html

 An excerpt from the article is as follows:

   "Researchers from Sun Microsystems Laboratories in Burlington,
    Massachusetts have created an open source speech synthesis engine
    written entirely in the Java(tm) programming language. This
    high-performance software converts text to speech. You type it;
    your workstation speaks it. And the whole world benefits.

    Willie Walker, Paul Lamere, and Philip Kwok combined the Festival
    Speech Synthesis System, with its robust architecture, and the
Flite
    engine, with its succinct algorithms, to create FreeTTS, a
synthesizer
    that delivers both power and flexibility.

    The team ported Flite, programmed in C, and Festival, written in
C++
    and Scheme, to the Java programming language. FreeTTS generated
    intelligible speech four weeks after researchers wrote the first
line
    of code. But even with such a short development time, the team did
not
    compromise results. FreeTTS outperforms both original applications,
    executing nearly four times faster than Flite in some
environments."

 For the Sun Labs Speech Group,

 Willie Walker,
 Manager and Principal Investigator

Regards Steve,
mailto:srp@bigpond.net.au.
MSN Messenger name:  internetuser383@hotmail.com