Package: wnpp Version: N/A; reported 2008-12-21 Severity: wishlist * Package name : mbrola Version : 3.01h Upstream Author : Dr Thierry Dutoit <thierry.dut...@fpms.ac.be> * URL : http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis * License : see the file readme.txt in the source zip: non-free as in without source code, and for non-commercial, non-military purposes, with and only with the voice and language databases made available by the author. Description : multilingual software speech synthesizer Mbrola is Thierry Dutoit's phonemizer for multilingual speech synthesis. The various diphone databases are distributed on separate packages, but they must be used with and only with Mbrola because of license matters. Read the copyright for details. . Mbrola itself doesn't provide full TTS. It is a speech synthesizer based on the concatenation of diphones. It takes a list of phonemes as input, together with prosodic information (duration of phonemes and a piecewise linear description of pitch), and produces speech samples on 16 bits (linear), at the sampling frequency of the diphone database. . Use Mbrola along with Freephone, cicero or espeak to have a complete text-to-speech in English.
I'm actually taking oralux' packaging of mbrola to Debian. Yes, that would basically be a fully binary package (i386, amd64, ppc, arm, alpha, and sparc), no source, no way to modify it (even the voices), and I had to get permission from the author to distribute it. However, the quality of the voices is very good compared to what we currently have in the main section. The idea would be to have the mbrola package containing the binary, and then separately package voices as mbrola-xyn, containing voice xyn (i.e. mbrola-fr1, mbrola-fr2, mbrola-en1, mbrola-en2 etc.) Since voices are a few MB, that is not really a waste to have separate packages, and permits lighter updates. I intend to also package freephone, cicero etc. but won't do so if mbrola itself can not enter even non-free. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
