[mary-users] Better unit selection: Mary 3.1beta1 released

[Marc Schröder]

MARY can now speak quite a bit more naturally!

After 11 months of work, we are proud to release a first version of the 
new unit selection component for MARY! Compared to MARY 3.0.x, the unit 
selection algorithms have been throughly rewritten, new data formats 
have been defined, efficiency was addressed...

...and as a result, we can present more natural-sounding and quite 
efficient unit selection synthesis in Java.
Go to the download page to get it: http://mary.dfki.de/download/


This initial release of the new unit selection code is of beta quality: 
even though we have tested it quite a bit, you may experience problems. 
Also, there is a number of open issues which we have not yet addressed, 
but intend to do so before the first stable release, 3.1.0.

Nevertheless, we would like to present the current system to those who 
would like to try it.

For English, there are the three Arctic voices from CMU -- slt, jmk, and 
bdl. There will be German voices, but we need to find time to import 
them (the labelled data is already lying on our hard disk...).
We welcome all who want to test this, and please give feedback via the 
mailing list.

Best wishes,

Marc, Sacha, Anna, and Mat

-- 
Dr. Marc Schröder, Senior Researcher
DFKI GmbH, Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3, D-66123 Saarbrücken, Germany
http://www.dfki.de/~schroed
Here. Now. Real, first-person experience. Am I there to witness it?