Chapter 1. Introduction

Table of Contents
Speech Synthesizers
Speaking Applications
What we lack

This chapter is intended to describe the current state and find out the problems which are needed to solve.

Speech Synthesizers

Hardware devices

Hardware synthesizers are the devices, which may be connected to PC. Mostly they are external, connected via serial or parallel port. There are also some internal devices for ISA bus or USB. Application may send textual data to the port and the device converts it to spoken letters and words. Data may contain also several control sequences in the form of escaped characters as commands. The problem, we are facing, is that each of these devices uses its own communication protocol.

Software devices

Epos

Epos is czech GPL synthesis ...

IBM ViaVoice

IBM ViaVoice is a commercial product, but we see it to be very good. It is available for Linux, ....

MBrola project

MBrola is a software speech synhesis ...

Odmluva

Odmluva is a simple (and very light) czech software speech synhesis ...