Java Newsletters Archive: 159

• Description: Open source speech synthesizer written entirely in the Java programming language.
• Requirements: JDK 1.4. Read about more requirements on the FreeTTS web site.

IBM's "Speech for Java"

• Description: Implementation based on IBM's ViaVoice product, which supports continuous dictation, command and control and speech synthesis. It supports all the European language versions of ViaVoice -- US & UK English, French, German, Italian and Spanish -- plus Japanese.
• Requirements: JDK 1.1.7 or later or JDK 1.2 on Windows 95 with 32MB, or Windows NT with 48MB. Both platforms also require an installation ViaVoice 98.

IBM's "Speech for Java" on Linux

• Description: Beta version of "Speech for Java" on Linux. Currently only supports speech recognition.
• Requirements: RedHat Linux 6.0 with 32MB, and Blackdown JDK 1.1.7 with native thread support.

The Cloud Garden

• Description: Implementation for use with any recognition/TTS speech engine compliant with Microsoft's SAPI5 (with SAPI4 support for TTS engines only). An additional package allows redirection of audio data to/from Files, Lines and remote clients (using the javax.sound.sampled package). Some examples demonstrate its use in applets in Netscape^TM and IE browsers.
• Requirements: JDK^TM 1.1 or better, Windows 98, Me, 2000 or NT, and any SAPI 5.1, 5.0 or 4.0 compliant speech engine (some of which can be downloaded from Microsoft's web site).

Lernout & Hauspie's TTS for Java Speech API

• Description: Implementations based upon ASR1600 and TTS3000 engines, which support command and control and speech synthesis. Supports 10 different voices and associated whispering voices for the English language. Provides control for pitch, pitch range, speaking rate, and volume.
• Requirements: Sun Solaris OS version 2.4 or later, JDK 1.1.5. Sun Swing package (free download) for graphical Type-n-Talk demo.
• More information: Contact Edmund Kwan, Director of Sales, Western Region Speech and Language Technologies and Solutions (ekwan@lhs.com)

Conversa Web 3.0

• Description: Conversa Web is a voice-enabled Web browser that provides a range of facilities for voice-navigation of the web by speech recognition and text-to-speech. The developers of Conversa Web chose to write a JSAPI implementation for the speech support.
• Requirements: Windows 95/98 or NT 4.0 running on Intel Pentium 166 MHz processor or faster (or equivalent). Minimum of 32 MB RAM (64 MB recommended). Multimedia system: sound card and speakers. Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 or higher.

Festival

• Description: Festival is a general multi-lingual speech synthesis system developed by the Centre for Speech Technology Research at the University of Edinburgh. It offers a full text to speech system with various APIs, as well an environment for development and research of speech synthesis techniques. It is written in C++ with a Scheme-based command interpreter for general control and provides a binding to the Java Speech API. Supports the English (British and American), Spanish and Welsh languages.
• Requirements: Festival runs on Suns (SunOS and Solaris), FreeBSD, Linux, SGIs, HPs and DEC Alphas and is portable to other Unix machines. Preliminary support is available for Windows 95 and NT. For details and requirements see the Festival download page.

Elan Speech Cube

• Description: Elan Speech Cube is a Multilingual, multichannel, cross-operating system text-to-speech software component for client-server architecture. Speech Cube is available with 2 TTS technologies (Elan Tempo : diphone concatenation and Elan Sayso : unit selection), covering 11 languages. Speech Cube native Java client supports JSAPI/JSML.
• Requirements: JDK 1.3 or later on Windows NT/2000/XP, Linux or Solaris 2.7/2.8, Speech Cube V4.2 and higher.
• About Elan Speech: Elan Speech is an established worldwide provider of text-to-speech technology (TTS). Elan TTS transforms any IT generated text into speech and reads it out loud.