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DevelopmentThe eSpeak Speech Synthesizer Your author has been interested in computer speech synthesis since the late 1970s, when he interfaced a Votrax SC-01A speech synthesizer chip to his Imsai 8080 computer with some wire-wrap wire. News of the recently created eSpeak project naturally piqued his long-time interest in speech synthesis.eSpeak is a compact phoneme-based speech synthesis system that is available under version 2 of the Gnu General Public license.
eSpeak is a software speech synthesizer for English, and potentially other languages.
eSpeak produces good quality English speech. It uses a different synthesis method from other open source TTS engines, and sounds quite different. It's perhaps not as natural or "smooth", but I find the articulation clearer and easier to listen to for long periods.
eSpeak is a much simpler system than Festival, a popular speech synthesis project from the University of Edinburgh's Centre for Speech Technology Research. Unfortunately, the Festival project has been stuck at version 1.95 (2.0 beta) for the last two years. The installation and usage document explains how to set up the software. Installation is trivial, if somewhat different than for most applications. It involves copying the binary speak file to an executable directory and moving a library directory to /usr/share. The combined executable and library files weigh in at under 500 Kb, making it suitable for use in embedded systems. Source code for eSpeak is available for those who wish to compile the software locally. Using the software is trivial, typing "speak 'what you want to say'" causes the desired speech to be rendered and output to the speaker. Speaking the contents of a file can be done with the command: speak -f filename. eSpeak can also read its input from stdin, allowing it to be used with other applications. There are currently nineteen English phoneme sets available which provide a variety of British accents, male/female voices and tonal characteristics. German and Esperanto phoneme sets are also available. Other languages can also be supported, but the work has not yet been done. eSpeak can output directly to the sound driver, it can also create .wav files, and send the audio to stdout. The -x option causes the program to output phoneme mnemonics to the screen. The speech quality is quite mechanical, but is fairly easy to understand. It is not as refined as the output of Festival, but should suffice for many applications. As with most speech synthesis applications, mispronunciation is fairly common, English pronunciation rules involve many special exceptions and ambiguities, accurate text to speech conversion is a non-trivial software task. The most recent release of eSpeak is version 1.10, released on April 29, 2006. The change log file indicates recent work on UTF-8 encoding, support for embedded pitch and amplitude modulation, improvements to numerical pronunciations, several new command line capabilities and more. If you need a decent open-source speech synthesis application for your latest project, or simply want to play with some interesting software, give eSpeak a try.
System Applications Database Software GLScube: Relational, Semantic Storage for Linux Amr Ramadan has announced the GLScube semantic storage project. "GLSł is an open source semantic storage solution for GNU/Linux that indexes your data, extracts from it metadata and relevant information, allows you to organize it using queries and tags, provides shared schemas between applications through an API, a pseudo file system for backward compatibility, a web interface, As-You-Type searching and more."
Firebird 2.00 Release Candidate 3 announced Version 2.00 Release Candidate 3 of the Firebird DBMS has been announced. "Firebird 2 contains a large number of new features, including derived tables, support for Execute Block, increased table sizes, new improved index code (the 252-byte index length limit is no longer applicable), expression indices, numerous optimiser improvements, enhanced security features, support for on-line incremental backups, new international language support, along with numerous other improvements and bug fixes."
Embedded Systems BusyBox 1.2.0 released Version 1.2.0 of BusyBox, a collection of command line utilities for embedded systems, is out. "The -devel branch has been stabilized and the result is Busybox 1.2.0. Lots of stuff changed, I need to work up a decent changelog over the weekend."
LDAP Software LAT 1.1.4 released Version 1.1.4 of LAT, the LDAP Administration Tool, is out with new capabilities and bug fixes.
Libraries Cairo release 1.2.0 now available Version 1.2.0 of the Cairo 2D graphics vector library has been announced. "We are very pleased to announce this release, the first major update to cairo since the original 1.0 release 10 months ago. Compared to cairo 1.0, the 1.2 release doubles the number of supported backends, adding PDF, PostScript, and SVG backends to the previous xlib, win32 and image backends."
Networking Tools Announcing the NDSAD project Konstantin Emelyanov has sent us a notice about a new network traffic collector project called NDSAD. "The NetUP ndsad utility captures IP-traffic from network interfaces and export NetFlow v.5. Data is gathered from libpcap library on Unix and from winpcap on Windows. Also you are able to use tee/divert sockets on FreeBSD and ULOG on Linux for data source."
Desktop Applications Audio Applications Aqualung 0.9 beta 5 released Version 0.9 beta 5 of Aqualung, a music player, is available with many new capabilities. "This is a new milestone release after 17 months of silent development. Large parts of the program have been rewritten, refactored, fixed, etc. A multitude of new features have been added to the software, which now weighs into Open Source with about 30,000 lines of GPL'ed source code, all written by a handful of free-time developers (no, you won't need your whole hand)."
aubio 0.3.1 is out Version 0.3.1 of aubio, a library for audio labeling, is out with bug fixes.
The future of freedb The freedb audio CD database project is falling apart: "freedb is not able to operate without Joerg and Ari. There are other - hopefully free - projects that will take over freedbs heritage in a better way and stay free. freedbs future did not seem to be kept free regarding the lastest developments, so I tried to steer against this as I felt it more important to stay free instead of getting fancy web 2.0 features. But unfortunately Joerg and Ari (the main doers behind freedb) disagreed with me and decided that they want to go another direction." If anyone wants to take over the project and domain name, the project will be allowed to continue. (Thanks to Richard Palmer.)
Desktop Environments GNOME Software Announcements The following new GNOME software has been announced this week:
KDE Software Announcements The following new KDE software has been announced this week:
KDE Commit-Digest for 2nd July 2006 (KDE.News) The July 2, 2006 edition of the KDE Commit-Digest has been announced. "In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: PDF hyperlink and file editing support in KViewShell. DVI format support in Okular. Continued progress in "WorKflow", "GMail-style conversation view for KMail" and "KDevelop-teamwork" Summer Of Code projects. BsFilter and DSpam tools are now supported in the KMail anti-spam wizard. LastFM stream support becomes more robust and polished, alongside other notable development work in Amarok. Aesthetic modifications made in Kmplot and Kalzium. KDE 4 changes: Work begins on the "Cokoon" widget style, and KSpell2 is renamed "Sonnet" in preparation for some interesting development work."
Electronics asco 0.4.3 announced Version 0.4.3 of asco, a SPICE circuit optimizer, has been announced. "Changes include support for the Qucs simulator, better Ctrl-C handling, native win32 compilation, autotools support and bug fixes.
Kicad 2006-06-26 released Version 2006-06-26 of Kicad, a printed circuit CAD application, is out. Changes include translation work, gcc 4.1 compatibility, editable field names, the ability to use URLs to document components, 3D color improvements, new pad editing features, negative printing and delete improvements.
Financial Applications SQL-Ledger 2.6.15 is out Version 2.6.15 of SQL-Ledger, a web-based accounting package, is out with several bug fixes.
Games Cyphesis 0.5.8 Released Version 0.5.8 of Cyphesis has been announced by the WorldForge game project. "Cyphesis is a small to medium scale server for WorldForge games, with builtin AI. This version includes the demo game Mason which is currently in development. This release is intended for server administrators wishing to run a Mason server and World developers developing new worlds or game systems."
Trip on the Funny Boat - 1.3 Version 1.3 of Trip on the Funny Boat has been announced on the PyGame site. "We got a nice patch from Konstantin Yegupov, so we decided to make a new release with his improvements. Some finer particle effect touches have been added, along with some cannonball-to-animal collision physics, a special super shot and a retro blinking effect when taking damage. Some bugs have also been squashed, which is always nice."
GUI Packages GTK+ 2.10.0 released (GnomeDesktop) GnomeDesktop.org looks at the new capabilities of GTK+ 2.10.0. Improvements include: printing support, recent files support, drag-and-drop support in notebooks, new widgets and cell renderers, changes in the filechooser, changes in the tree view widget, changes in the text view and entry widgets, themability improvements and changes to GTK and gdk-pixbuf.
Trolltech Releases Qt 4.2 Technology Preview (KDE.News) KDE.News looks at the new Qt 4.2 technology preview. "The final release of Qt 4.2 is currently scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2006." 4.2 adds a new canvas, SVG support and improved integration with GTK, CUPS and DBus."
Music Applications LoopDub version 0.2 released Version 0.2 of LoopDub, a cross-platform application for performing live loop manipulation, is available with a number of new capabilities.
MMA Beta 0.22 released Version 0.22 beta of MMA, the Musical MIDI Accompaniment accompaniment generator is out with the following changes: "Minor (and not-so-minor) bug fixes, added options to GROOVE selections, HARMONYVOLUME setting, FORCEOUT option for keyboard tracks, and some command line fixes."
Office Suites OpenOffice.org 2.0.3 Is Available Version 2.0.3 of the OpenOffice.org office suite has been announced. "OpenOffice.org 2.0.3 is now ready for download, three months since the release of 2.0.2. This latest release contains a mixture of new features, bug fixes, and security patches, and demonstrates the OpenOffice.org Community's determination to maintain its position as the world's leading open-source office productivity suite."
OpenOffice.org Newsletter The June, 2006 edition of the OpenOffice.org Newsletter is online with the latest OO.o office suite news.
Miscellaneous GCstar, collection manager (GnomeDesktop) GnomeDesktop.org looks at the personal collection manager GCstar. "Detailed information on each item can be automatically retrieved from the internet and you can store additional data, such as the location or who you've lent it to. You may also search and filter your collection by some criteria."
Sunclock 3.55 released Stable version 3.55 of Sunclock has been announced. "Sunclock displays a map of the Earth and shows which portion is illuminated by the sun."
Languages and Tools Caml Caml Weekly News The July 4, 2006 edition of the Caml Weekly News is out with new Caml language articles.
Lisp ECL 0.9i released Version 0.9i of Embeddable Common-Lisp is available. "ECL (Embeddable Common-Lisp) is "an effort to modernize Giuseppe Attardi's ECL (ECoLisp) environment to produce an implementation of the Common-Lisp language which complies to the ANSI X3J13 definition of the language"."
Python python-dev Summary The May 16-31, 2006 edition of the python-dev Summary is online with coverage of the python-dev mailing list.
Ruby Ruby Weekly News The July 2nd, 2006 edition of the Ruby Weekly News looks at the latest discussions on the ruby-talk mailing list and comp.lang.ruby newsgroup.
Tcl/Tk Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL! The July 1, 2006 edition of Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL! is online with new Tcl/Tk articles and resources.
Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL! The July 3, 2006 edition of Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL! is online with new Tcl/Tk articles and resources.
Page editor: Forrest Cook |
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