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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=<path-to-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 <sysseh@devetir.qld.gov.au> (Preliminary Netaudio port)
Greg Renda <greg@ncd.com> (Netaudio cleanup)
Tracey Bernath <bernath@bnr.ca> (Netaudio testing)
"Tom Benoist" <ben@ifx.com> (SGI Port)
Andrew Anselmo <anselmo@ERXSG.rl.plh.af.mil> (SGI testing)
Mark Hanning-Lee <markhl@iris-355.jpl.nasa.gov> (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)
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