This is a text to speech system produced by integrating various pieces
of code and tables of data, which are all (I believe) suitable
for use in OpenSource projects.

The files in this distribution are either under GPL or LGPL.

For best quality it is highly desirable to use one of the dictionaries
suggested below.

The uses GNU autoconf 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 that are actively
maintained by me:

1. Linux - ALSA or OSS
   OSS driver will probably work on netbsd/freebsd etc.
   configure should sort this out.

2. Windows - I will be supporting it, but it may not work
   in this version.

3. 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.)

There are also drivers from the really old rsynth code
which are still there:

*  Sun SPARCStations - written & tested by me (when at TI)
   on SunOS4.1.3 and Solaris2.3
*  NeXT
*  SGI - this built on "mips-sgi-irix4.0.5H"
*  HPUX

configure now looks for libsndfile and if found uses it to write
audio to a file. So package can now write .wav files.
libsndfile is often already included in linux distributions
(although you may need to install the "devel" package to get headers).

If not it can be found here:

    http://www.mega-nerd.com/libsndfile/

Dictionaries:

      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 SAMPA, as defined by J C Wells at UCL see:

      http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/sampa/home.htm

      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.0.6.gz

      2. "beep" from
         ftp://svr-ftp.eng.cam.ac.uk/pub/comp.speech/dictionaries
              Latest seems to be beep-1.0.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.0.6 --with-bDict=../dict/beep-1.0

      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.

There is an experimental hook to allow you to "say" .pho files intended
for MBrola diphone synth.

http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/mbrola.html

This is used to provide a hacky back-end
for Festival.
http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/

Projects:
  Plan is to pre-analyze the dictionaries and produce better letter
  to sound rules and smaller exception dictionaries.

  Add more of IPA repertiore so that synth can attempt more languages.

  Improve quality.

The components (top down ) :

   saymain.c
      C main() function.
      Initializes lower layers and then converts words from
      command line or "stdin" to phonemes.

   say.c / say.h
      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.

   opsynth.c / rsynth.h

      My re-implementation of the "Klatt" synthesizer, described
      in Klatt [2].

    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)

     Cornelis van der Laan <nils@ims.uni-stuttgart.de> (freebsd)

   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.