The MBROLA project: towards a set of high quality speech synthesizers free of use for non commercial purposes

Abstract

The aim of the MBROLA project, initiated by the Faculte Polytechnique de Mons (Belgium), is to obtain a set of speech synthesizers for as many voices, languages and dialects as possible, free of use for non-commercial and non-military applications. The ultimate goal is to boost academic research on speech synthesis, and particularly on prosody generation, known as one of the biggest challenges taken up by text-to-speech synthesizers for the years to come. Central to the MBROLA project is MBROLA 2.00, a speech synthesizer based on the concatenation of diphones. Executable files of this synthesizer have been made freely available for many computers/operating systems, as well as a first diphone database for a French male voice. We describe the terms of participation to the project, as a user, as an associated developer, or as a database provider.