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Open Source text-to-speech using Sun Microsystems Java
Java program running FreeTTS with an MBROLA text-to-speech voice on Windows |
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This demo was assembled by Bert Szoghy, email: webmaster@quadmore.com
Last code update: February 21 2005
Last page update: February 22 2005
Credits:
FreeTTS is copyright Sun Microsystems. Web page: http://freetts.sourceforge.net/docs/index.php
MBROLA is copyright Faculte Polytechnique De Mons, TCTS Lab: special thanks to Baris Bozkurt.
http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/mbrola/mbrcopybin.html
The MBROLA bug fix was found by Dr. Jianmin Li.
Thanks to Kemal Altintas for the correct DOS command.
Special thanks to Dirk Schnelle for help with the ANT build.xml. Please visit Dirk's JVoiceXML
project at http://jvoicexml.sourceforge.net
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
This demo has been tested to run properly on the following operating systems: Windows NT 4, Windows 2000 and Windows XP Pro. It should also run with no problem on Windows 2003.
It will not run on Windows 98 or Windows ME, due to a healthy combination of Unicode and the DOS hack used on the MBROLA.EXE executable.
BEFORE BEGINNING
On Windows, download and unzip mbroquad.zip preserving the directory structure (assuming to the C: drive).
If you are serious about coding in Java, please use ANT! http://ant.apache.org/
RUNNING THE PROGRAM WITHOUT USING ANT
If you unzip this directory to the C: drive, and you have Java installed but not ANT on the
Windows platform, the two following commands in a DOS prompt will run the program:
cd C:\mbroquad
java -Dmbrola.base=./mbrola -jar classes/FreeTTSHelloWorld.jar mbrola_us3
This should indicate your system has two voices available, "kevin" and "mbrola_us3" and that the voice used will be "mbrola_us3".
MODIFYING THE SOURCE CODE, THEN RECOMPILING AND RUNNING THE PROGRAM WITH ANT
cd C:\mbroquad
ant run
Please refer to the build.xml file to appreciate the magic.
MBROLA VOICES AVAILABLE TO FREETTS
Three voices can work with FreeTTS: us1, us2 and us3. The first two "buzz" on my Windows
2000 box, the last does not and is included. Your mileage may vary.
Other voices were tried, such as en1, but FreeTTS is blind to them (voice not detected). You
will need to hack the FreeTTS source and recompile. Same if you want to use another language
than English.
The other two voices are available at:
http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/mbrola/dba/us1/us1-980512.zip
and
http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/mbrola/dba/us2/us2-980812.zip
FEEDBACK
Please email us and let us know what system configurations (OS version, CPU and RAM combination) have worked for you.
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and Java Web Services, along with the Simpletext SQL database
Quadmore Java to Microsoft SAPI bridge for Windows: Sun Java to Microsoft Speech API 5.1
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