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Overview of a typical TTS system

A text-to-speech system (or “engine”) is composed of two parts:^[3] a front-end and a back-end. The front-end has two major tasks. First, it converts raw text containing symbols like numbers and abbreviations into the equivalent of written-out words. This process is often called text normalization, pre-processing, or tokenization. The front-end then assigns phonetic transcriptions to each word, and divides and marks the text into prosodic units, like phrases, clauses, and sentences. The process of assigning phonetic transcriptions to words is called text-to-phoneme or grapheme-to-phoneme conversion. Phonetic transcriptions and prosody information together make up the symbolic linguistic representation that is output by the front-end. The back-end—often referred to as the synthesizer—then converts the symbolic linguistic representation into sound. In certain systems, this part includes the computation of the target prosody (pitch contour, phoneme durations),^[4] which is then imposed on the output speech.

Here is a non-exhaustive comparison of speech synthesis programs

Festival offers a general framework for building speech synthesis systems as well as including examples of various modules. As a whole it offers full text to speech through a number APIs: from shell level, though a Scheme command interpreter, as a C++ library, from Java, and an Emacs interface. Festival is multi-lingual (currently English (British and American), and Spanish) though English is the most advanced. Other groups release new languages for the system. And full tools and documentation for build new voices are available through Carnegie Mellon’s FestVox project (http://festvox.org)

The system is written in C++ and uses the Edinburgh Speech Tools Library for low level architecture and has a Scheme (SIOD) based command interpreter for control. Documentation is given in the FSF texinfo format which can generate, a printed manual, info files and HTML.

Festival is free software. Festival and the speech tools are distributed under an X11-type licence allowing unrestricted commercial and non-commercial use alike.

Text to Speech engine for English and many other languages. Compact size with clear but artificial pronunciation. Available as a command-line program with many options, a shared library for Linux, and a Windows SAPI5 version.

eSpeak is a compact open source software speech synthesizer for English and other languages, for Linux and Windows.   http://espeak.sourceforge.net

eSpeak uses a “formant synthesis” method. This allows many languages to be provided in a small size. The speech is clear, and can be used at high speeds, but is not as natural or smooth as larger synthesizers which are based on human speech recordings.

eSpeak is available as:

• A command line program (Linux and Windows) to speak text from a file or from stdin.
• A shared library version for use by other programs. (On Windows this is a DLL).
• A SAPI5 version for Windows, so it can be used with screen-readers and other programs that support the Windows SAPI5 interface.
• eSpeak has been ported to other platforms, including Android, Mac OSX and Solaris.

Features.

• Includes different Voices, whose characteristics can be altered.
• Can produce speech output as a WAV file.
• SSML (Speech Synthesis Markup Language) is supported (not complete), and also HTML.
• Compact size. The program and its data, including many languages, totals about 2 Mbytes.
• Can be used as a front-end to MBROLA diphone voices, see mbrola.html. eSpeak converts text to phonemes with pitch and length information.
• Can translate text into phoneme codes, so it could be adapted as a front end for another speech synthesis engine.
• Potential for other languages. Several are included in varying stages of progress. Help from native speakers for these or other languages is welcome.
• Development tools are available for producing and tuning phoneme data.
• Written in C.