Festival Speech Synthesis System - 4 What is new

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# 4 What is new

Compared to the the previous major release (1.3.0 release Aug 1998) 1.4.0 is not functionally so different from its previous versions. This release is primarily a consolidation release fixing and tidying up some of the lower level aspects of the system to all better modularity for some of our future planned module.

- Copyright change: The system is now free and has no commercial restriction. Note that currently on the US voices (ked and kal) are also now unrestricted. The UK English voices depend on the Oxford Advanced Learners' Dictionary of Current English which cannot be used for commercial use without permission from Oxford University Press.
- Architecture tidy up: the interfaces to lower level part parts of the system have been tidied up deleting some of the older code that was supported for compatibility reasons. This is a much higher dependence of features and easier (and safer) ways to register new objects as feature values and Scheme objects. Scheme has been tidied up. It is no longer "in one defun" but "in one directory".
- New documentation system for speech tools: A new docbook based documentation system has been added to the speech tools. Festival's documentation will will move over to this sometime soon too.
- initial JSAPI support: both JSAPI and JSML (somewhat similar to Sable) now have initial impelementations. They of course depend on Java support which so far we have only (successfully) investgated under Solaris and Linux.
- Generalization of statistical models: CART, ngrams, and WFSTs are now fully supported from Lisp and can be used with a generalized viterbi function. This makes adding quite complex statistical models easy without adding new C++.
- Tilt Intonation modelling: Full support is now included for the Tilt intomation models, both training and use.
- Documentation on Bulding New Voices in Festival: documentation, scripts etc. for building new voices and languages in the system, see

      http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/docs/festvox/

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