FW: OpenMary: Open Source Emotional Text-to-Speech Synthesis System Released

[Gilles Casse]

From: Marc Schröder <schroed at dfki.de>
Date: Tue, 14 Feb 2006 19:49:34 +0100

[Apologies if you receive multiple copies of this announcement]

The landscape of open source speech synthesizers is growing richer. The
German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), partner in
the Network of Excellence HUMAINE on emotion-oriented computing, has
decided to release its emotional text-to-speech synthesis system MARY as
open source.

The system can be downloaded from http://mary.dfki.de

MARY is a multi-lingual (German, English, Tibetan) and multi-platform
(Windows, Linux, MacOs X and Solaris) speech synthesis system. It comes
with an easy-to-use installer -- no technical expertise should be
required for installation.

Main features:

* easy installation using web-based installer
   - modularity: only install the components you need
   - automated dependency checks: missing components can be downloaded
     automatically
     http://mary.dfki.de/download

* several languages and voices
   - German, English and Tibetan synthesis
   - MBROLA and LPC diphone voices
   - CMU ARCTIC cluster unit selection voices
   - limited domain voices

* expressive speech synthesis
   - With the tool "EmoSpeak", MARY can synthesize emotionally expressive
     speech using diphone voices
   - Expressive unit selection voices exist
     (e.g., a German football announcer)

* Markup support
   - MARY can read and interpret several markup languages, including
     SSML (speech synthesis markup language) and
     APML (agent player markup language)
   - Timing information for Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) and
     Talking Heads
   - High parametrisability of prosody, e.g. for emotion expression,
     information status, etc.

* Stable client-server architecture
   - Multi-threaded Java server, can be used in web applications
   - GUI client is easy to use and powerful
   - Example implementations of clients in other programming languages

* Incremental processing
   - synthesized speech is produced incrementally as the input is
     processed
     It can be sent to the client as an audio stream, so that the delay
     until the first sound is played is short even for large files

* Mailing list
   - MARY users are invited to subscribe to the mary-users mailing list:
     http://www.dfki.de/mailman/listinfo/mary-users

* Development environment
   - OpenMary development is based on a modern Trac-based system,
     featuring SVN-based source code versioning, ticket-based bug
     reports, and wiki-based documentation:
     http://mary.opendfki.de
   - Project definition files for importing the source code into Eclipse
   - Javadoc available online:
     http://mary.dfki.de/javadoc
   - Plans for future releases include full unit selection support,
     JSAPI support, accessibility support for the client, and more.
     Volunteers are very welcome! For details, see:
     http://mary.opendfki.de/report/1

* Licenses
   - the core OpenMary system, including English and Tibetan components,
     is released as open source under a BSD-style license;
   - the German components are released under a DFKI research license;
   - MBROLA binaries and voice databases are available under a
     non-commercial and non-military license.

Try it out! -- http://mary.dfki.de

-- 
Dr. Marc Schröder, Senior Researcher
DFKI GmbH, Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3, D-66123 Saarbrücken, Germany
http://www.dfki.de/~schroed
Here. Now. Real, first-person experience. Am I there to witness it?