FreeTTS 1.2.2

Philip Kwok — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 20:34:33 -0000

It is with great pleasure that we announce the 1.2 release of FreeTTS:

http://freetts.sourceforge.net/

In this release, we have provided the following new features and
improvements over the 1.2.1 release:

- Introduced an AliasDiphone class as a subclass of Diphone, which has a name and an original diphone; most API calls are just forwarded to the original diphone
- In text db files, introduced a new type of line, "ALIAS new old", where "old" is the name of an existing diphone (must have been defined higher-up in the text db file using the traditional "DIPHONE...." mechanism), and "new" is the new name under which the diphone is to be known additionally. DiphoneUnitDatabase.parseAndAdd () has been adapted accordingly.
- In binary db files, introduced a new magic code identifying an alias diphone entry. Diphone.loadBinary() has been adapted accordingly.
- Fixed "Class-Path" issue in manifest created by FestVoxToFreeTTS.
- Fixed internal class loader problems
- using java logging library instead of system.out.println
- separation into a core jar and a jsapi1.0 dependent jar
- Bugfixes in JavaClipAudioPlayer
Catching runtime exceptions if the line is not available
writing directly to the output line instead of buffering the data
- some code cleanup

FreeTTS is a speech synthesis system written entirely in the Java
programming language. It is based upon Flite, a small, fast, run-time
speech synthesis engine, which in turn is based upon University of
Edinburgh's Festival Speech Synthesis System and Carnegie Mellon
University's FestVox project. Many thanks to Alan Black and Kevin
Lenzo for their hard work and contributions to speech synthesis
research.

Sincerely,

The FreeTTS Team

FreeTTS moved to subversion

Philip Kwok — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 18:52:37 -0000

The CVS repository for FreeTTS is no longer being used. It has been replaced in favor of subversion.

FreeTTS 1.2 is Now Available

Philip Kwok — Mon, 07 Feb 2005 20:20:20 -0000

It is with great pleasure that we announce the 1.2 release of FreeTTS:

http://freetts.sourceforge.net/

In this release, we have provided the following new features and
improvements over the 1.2 beta2 release:

- Improvements to the emacspeak server demo
- Performance improvements for time-to-first-sample and cancel
- Improvements to the state name expansion logic (bug 1101229)
- Pronunciations for British Sterling and "not" sign (bug 1100888)
- New pronunciations for Linux terms (bug 1006630)
- Clarifications to speech.properties message (rfe 1041437 and bug 1041296)
- Fix for -dump{Multi}Audio problem in freetts app (bug 986503).
- Elimination of hang with JDK1.5 (bug 1019337)
- Tools specifically for importing CMU ARCTIC Voices.
- Fix for MBROLA phoneme remapping (bug 1013781).
- Rudimentary internationalization to FestVox import.
- Support to build FreeTTS w/o requiring JSAPI
- Only build tests on demand (more freedom from JUnit)

In addition, many thanks to Marc Schroeder and his team in the
Language Technology Lab at DFKI for their additions and improvements
to FreeTTS.

Sincerely,

The FreeTTS Team:
(in alph. order)

Philip Kwok
Paul Lamere
Marc Schroeder
Willie Walker (overall lead)

FreeTTS Sightings Forum Created

Philip Kwok — Mon, 19 Jul 2004 13:54:46 -0000

There have been a large number of FreeTTS downloads since we released it in December of 2001. I'm personally curious about who is using our work. To help with this, and to give users a place to advertise their work, I have created a "Sightings" forum. If you're a FreeTTS user, please post a note to the "Sightings" forum to let us know more about your project:

http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=392174

Sincerely,

Willie Walker
Principal Investigator, Speech
Sun Microsystems Laboratories

FreeTTS 1.2beta2 is now available

Philip Kwok — Wed, 16 Jun 2004 12:21:00 -0000

I'm pleased to announce the release of FreeTTS 1.2beta2. FreeTTS 1.2beta2 is mostly a maintenance release over FreeTTS 1.2beta, but includes enough changes that I don't feel comfortable releasing FreeTTS 1.2 final.

FreeTTS 1.2beta2 is available at http://freetts.sourceforge.net/, and includes the following changes over FreeTTS 1.2beta:

- Added experimental CMUArcticVoice that may (or may not) work with the CMU ARCTIC databases (http://festvox.org/cmu_arctic/). I'm looking for a collaborator to help get these voices into FreeTTS. It's not trivial and it's not for the impatient. If you're up to the challenge, drop me a line.

- Added CMUTimeVoice, which has noop post lexical processing to support the FestVox limited domain time voice scheme. Modified FestVoxToFreeTTS to use this voice in the template.

- Restructured cluster unit voice for simple extensions.

- Added com.sun.speech.freetts.lexicon.userAddenda property to allow people to add their own custom pronunciations in a much simpler manner.

- Added a number of custom pronunciations to built-in lexicon. FreeTTS now speaks its name correcly. :-)

- Fixed problem where the space character in the path would cause issues with finding voice jars (bug 938225). Many thanks to David Vos for providing this fix.

- Added backwards compatibility for GNOME Speech API.

- Fixed deallocate problem (bug 922579).

- Added "@" and "?" to list of known characters for German. Many thanks to Marc Schrder, Senior Researcher at
DFKI GmbH, for this fix.

- Fixed problem where some jar files in the FreeTTS directory would cause issues with discovering voices.

- Added defaultAudioPlayer property to voice (RFE 922580).

FreeTTS 1.2beta2 has been tested in Solaris, RedHat 9.0, Mac OS X, and Windows. The JavaSound implementation on Linux continues to be a bit dicey due to the underlying oddities of audio support in the operating system. As such, if you are a Linux user, we especially need your help to test FreeTTS 1.2beta2.

Have fun, and please send us your feedback!

For the Sun Microsystems Laboratories Speech Team,

Willie Walker
Paul Lamere
Philip Kwok

FreeTTS 1.2beta is now available

Philip Kwok — Mon, 22 Dec 2003 15:08:48 -0000

I'm pleased to announce the release of FreeTTS 1.2beta. FreeTTS 1.2beta is feature-equivalent to Flite 1.2, including the ability to import voice data directly from FestVox voices. With this release, you can now make your voice the voice of FreeTTS! Give it a shot and be the first in your neighborhood to submit your voice to the FreeTTS effort.

In addition to being able to import voice data from FestVox, FreeTTS 1.2beta includes a lot of significant changes over FreeTTS 1.1.2:

- Abandoned gmake in favor of ant

- Gratuitous use of jar file manifests to help reduce the need for lengthy CLASSPATHs

- Added capability to set the AudioPlayer on a JSAPI Voice

- Added support for MBROLA on the Mac (still broken on Windows)

- Extended voice packaging scheme to simplify management and addition of new voices, including dynamic detection and loading of voice jar files

Since there were so many changes, we decided a beta release was the better way to go this time around. Please download it, try it out, and send us your feedback so we can get on to our release of FreeTTS 1.2.0.

Have fun!

For the Sun Microsystems Laboratories Speech Team,

Willie Walker
Paul Lamere
Philip Kwok

FreeTTS 1.1.2 is now Available

Philip Kwok — Wed, 14 May 2003 15:16:32 -0000

I'm pleased to announce the release of FreeTTS 1.1.2. This release contains fixes to a few pesky bugs in the FreeTTS 1.1.1 release, including the following:

- Fixed bug in TokenToWords that causes abbreviations like "OK" and "HI" to be spoken as a US state rather than just "ok" and "hi".

- Fixed race condition in JavaStreamingAudioPlayer that would cause output to not be totally cancelled.

- Refactored all System.getProperty calls to call a wrapper utility called Utilities.getPropery. This method catches a SecurityException and deals with it properly, so that it can be called from an applet.

- Fixed problem in the JSAPI implementation where the audio player was not being closed when the synthesizer was deallocated. This would cause problems for certain types of AudioPlayers such as SingleFileAudioPlayer that require a 'close' before they flush their accumulated wave data.

Also note that our summer intern starts on Monday -- he'll be working on tools to migrate FestVox voices to FreeTTS. Look for a new release by the fall!

Have fun!

For the Sun Microsystems Laboratories Speech Team,

Willie Walker
Paul Lamere
Philip Kwok

FreeTTS on javasoft.com

Philip Kwok — Fri, 21 Dec 2001 10:41:23 -0000

The FreeTTS project is the featured article at http://www.javasoft.com for the week of December 19.

FreeTTS is a speech synthesis system written entirely in the Java programming language.

Welcome!

Philip Kwok — Sat, 15 Dec 2001 20:46:04 -0000

Welcome and thank you for visiting the FreeTTS open source project. We're very excited to make a speech synthesizer written completely in the Java(tm) programming language available for free under a BSD-style license. In addition, we're also happy to make the source code available as well.

We'd like to acknowledge Alan Black and Kevin Lenzo from Carnegie Mellon University for their work with the Flite (http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/flite/) synthesis engine, and also acknowledge the University of Edinburgh for their work
with the Festival Speech Synthesis System
(http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/). Their expertise and hard work helped make this project succeed.

I would also like to thank my management at Sun Microsystems for allowing us to pursue this project and for making my position at Sun the best job I've ever had.

By making our project available in a public forum, it is our intent to help foster free speech development and research. Please jump in, get your feet wet, and help make the FreeTTS project a success.

For the Sun Microsystems Laboratories Speech Group,Willie Walker, Principal Investigator and Manager Paul Lamere, Staff Engineer Philip Kwok, Member of Technical Staff

Recent posts to news

FreeTTS 1.2.2

FreeTTS moved to subversion

FreeTTS 1.2 is Now Available

FreeTTS Sightings Forum Created

FreeTTS 1.2beta2 is now available

FreeTTS 1.2beta is now available

FreeTTS 1.1.2 is now Available

FreeTTS on javasoft.com

Welcome!