This is a text to speech system produced by integrating various pieces of code and tables of data, which are all (I believe) in the public domain. The bulk of the intergration was done by myself, that is Nick Ing-Simmons. I can be reached via my employer at nik@tiuk.ti.com. THIS PACKAGE HAS NO CONNECTION WITH TEXAS INSTRUMENTS; IT IS A PRIVATE PROJECT OF MY OWN. Despite the E-mail address (which is via TI's US operation) I actually work in the UK. Ideally you should have obtained and installed GNU gdbm (I use version 1.7.3). If you have it but cannot install it see below. For best quality it is highly desirable to use one of the dictionaries suggested below. The package now uses GNU autoconf-2.0 to build a configure script. The generic install instructions are in INSTALL, but basically it works like this : configure make make check say --help say Something of your choice make -n install # see what it is going to do make install # copy program(s) to /usr/local/bin configure --help and INSTALL file explain configure options which may help. To allow the package to be built when installer cannot install the GNU gdbm package in the "normal" place you can specify a pathname to the gdbm source directory as follows : configure --with-gdbm= e.g. configure --with-gdbm=$HOME/gdbm Currently there are the following drivers: 1. Sun SPARCStations - written & tested by me (nik@tiuk.ti.com) on SunOS4.1.3 and Solaris2.3 2. Linux - see README.linux 3. NeXT 4. SGI - this builds on "mips-sgi-irix4.0.5H" see README.sgi for (a bit) more detail. 5. HPUX 6. Any machine for which a nas/netaudio port exists. And for which configure can find the include files and libraries. (Nas "net audio server" does for audio what X11 does for graphics it is available from ftp.x.org:/contrib/audio/nas .) Dictionaries: THIS VERSION WILL NOT USE THE SAME DICTIONARY AS PREVIOUS VERSIONS. The change was to allow at least one dictionary with a non-restrictive copyright to be used. Dictionaries convert words in "text" to phonemes in "arpabet" symbols. The arpabet symbols are then "expanded" into an ASCII representation of the IPA. The IPA representation is inherited from the "Computer Usable Version of Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary" (CUVOLAD). The CUVOLAD was used directly by previous releases of rsynth. CUVOLAD is available from Oxford Text Archive. Dictionary databases can be built from either of two ftp'able sources: 1. The Carnegie Mellon Pronouncing Dictionary [cmudict.0.1] is Copyright 1993 by Carnegie Mellon University. Use of this dictionary, for any research or commercial purpose, is completely unrestricted. If you make use of or redistribute this material, we would appreciate acknowlegement of its origin. ftp://ftp.cs.cmu.edu:project/fgdata/dict Latest seems to be cmudict.0.3.Z 2. "beep" from ftp://svr-ftp.eng.cam.ac.uk/comp.speech/data Latest seems to be beep-0.4.tar.gz This is a direct desendant of CUVOLAD (british pronounciation) (as used by previous releases of rsynth), and so has a more restrictive copyright than CMU dictionary. dict.c looks for bDict.db by default. b is for british e.g. beep I use aDict.db for CMU (american) dictionary. You can then : say -d a schedule # sked... say -d b schedule # shed... It is simplest to obtain dictionaries prior to configuring the package and tell it where the source are at configure time: configure --with-aDict=../dict/cmudict.0.3 --with-bDict=../dict/beep-0.4 If you have already built/installed the package you can gdbm from it as follows: mkdictdb main-dictionary-file bDict.db mv bDict.db /usr/local/lib Expect a few messages from mkdictdb about words it does not like in either dictionary. It should not be too hard to port it to other hardware. For a discussion of these issues see PORTING. Use say --help to get a list of command line options. SPARCStation-10 can play audio at rates other than 8000Hz, so if -r is used with an acceptable rate it still plays. If you have '10 then "man 4 dbri" explains legal rates. The components (top down ) : say.c / say.h C main() function. Initializes lower layers and then converts words from command line or "stdin" to phonemes. Some "normalization" of the text is performed, in particular numbers can be represented as sequences of digits. dict.c / dict.h As of this release uses a GNU "gdbm" database which has been pre-loaded with a pronounciation dictionary. text.c / english.c / text.h An implementation of US Naval Research Laboratory rules for converting english (american?) text to phonemes. Based on the version on the comp.speech archives, main changes were in the encoding of the phonemes from the so called "arpabet" to a more concise form used in the above dictionary. This form (which is nmemonic if you know the International Phonetic Alphabet), is described in the dictionary documentation. It is also very close to that described in the postings by Evan Kirshenbaum (evan@hplerk.hpl.hp.com) to sci.lang and alt.usage.english. (The differences are in the vowels and are probably due to the differences between Britsh and American english). saynum.c Code for "saying" numbers derived from same source as above. It has been modified to call the higher level routines recursively rather producing phonemes directly. This will allow any systematic changes (e.g. British vs American switch) to affect numbers without having to change this module. holmes.c / holmes.h / elements.c / elements.def My implementation of a phoneme to "vocal tract parameters" system described by Holmes et. al. [1] The original used an Analogue Hardware synthesizer. nsynth.c / nsynth.h / def_pars.c My recoding of the version of the "Klatt" synthesizer, described in Klatt [2]. I obtained C source code from Jon Iles who had modified the version originally posted to "comp.speech". I have extensively re-coded it in my C style as opposed to Klatt's "original" which showed its FORTRAN ancestry. In my (non-expert) opinion, the changes are extensive enough to avoid any copyright on the original. Only as small subset of the functionality of the synthesizer is used by the "holmes.c" driver. hplay.c / hplay.h hplay.h describes a common interface. hplay.c is a link to play/xxxplay.c Acknowledgements : Particular thanks to Tony Robinson ajr@eng.cam.ac.uk for providing FTP site for alpha testing, and telnet access to a variety of machines. Many thanks to Axel Belinfante Axel.Belinfante@cs.utwente.nl (World Wide Web) Jon Iles J.P.Iles@cs.bham.ac.uk Rob Hooft hooft@EMBL-Heidelberg.de (linux stuff) Thierry Excoffier exco@ligiahp3.univ-lyon1.fr (playpipe for hpux) Markus Gyger mgyger@itr.ch (HPUX port) Ben Stuyts ben@stuyts.nl (NeXT port) Stephen Hocking (Preliminary Netaudio port) Greg Renda (Netaudio cleanup) Tracey Bernath (Netaudio testing) "Tom Benoist" (SGI Port) Andrew Anselmo (SGI testing) Mark Hanning-Lee (SGI testing) for assisting me in puting this package together. References : [1] Holmes J. N., Mattingly I, and Shearme J. (1964) "Speech Synthesis by Rule" , Language Speech 7, 127-143 [2] Dennis H. Klatt (1980) "Software for a Cascade/Parallel Formant Synthesizer", J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 67(3), March 1980. Sources : OXFORD TEXT ARCHIVE The Oxford Text Archive has for several years maintained copies of several machine-readable dictionaries along with its extensive (if unsystematic) collections of other machine-readable texts. This document gives some further details of the various dictionaries available, and summarises the conditions under which copies of them are currently distributed. The Oxford Text Archive Shortlist (available on request via electronic mail and by FTP) gives up to date brief details of all texts held in the Archive. Send electronic mail to ARCHIVE@VAX.OXFORD.AC.UK. For anonymous FTP, look in the directory ota on ota.ox.ac.uk (129.67.1.165) Internet newsgroups : comp.speech and its archive on svr-ftp.eng.cam.ac.uk (Many of starting point sources). sci.lang (For ASCII IPA)