MBROLA: Free Speech Synthesis Project

Platform: Sun4, Sun/SunOS5.4, HP, VAX/VMS, DEC Alpha/VMS, PS/DOS, PS/Windows 3.1, PS/Windows 95, PC/Solaris2.4, PC/Linux, SGI INDY/IRIX, NeXT, and soon for Macintosh.
Description: MBROLA is a high-quality, diphone-based speech synthesizer which is available for free. It is provided by the TCTS Lab of the Faculte Polytechnique de Mons (Belgium) which aims to obtain a set a speech synthesizers for as many languages as possible which will be free of use for non-commercial, non-military applications.
MBROLA 2.00 takes a list of phonemes as input, together with prosodic information (duration of phonemes and a piecewise linear description of pitch), and produces 16bit speech samples at the sampling frequency of the diphone database (typically 16kHz). (It is therefore NOT a Text-To-Speech (TTS) synthesizer, since it does not accept raw text as input.) Databases are now being prepared for English, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, and Romanian. Collaborations are welcome. More information can be found at the MBROLA project homepage.
Demonstration: WWW demo of MBROLA which compares the quality of PSOLA, MBR-PSOLA, LPC, and Hybrid Harmonic/Stochastic concatenative synthesizers is available at
http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/modelcmp.html.
Contact: Dr Thierry Dutoit
Faculte Polytechnique de Mons, TCTS Lab,
31, bvd Dolez, B-7000 Mons, Belgium.
Ph: +32-65-374133, Fax: +32-65-374129
e-mail: mbrola@tcts.fpms.ac.be
WWW: http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/mbrola.html