----- 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