[mary-users] MARY TTS 4.2.0 released

[Marc Schroeder]

Dear MARY TTS users,

with the end of year approaching, there are going to be two 
end-of-project releases of MARY TTS: Today we are releasing MARY TTS 
4.2.0, which marks the final stage of our TTS work in the SEMAINE 
project; in one to two weeks, we intend to release MARY 4.3.0, which 
will mark the end of the PAVOQUE project. Project deadlines are such 
that we could not merge the two into a single release.

Best regards, and enjoy the release,

The MARY TTS team


MARY TTS 4.2.0: Release notes
(see also http://mary.opendfki.de/wiki/4.2.0)

Download MARY TTS 4.2.0 from 
http://mary.dfki.de/download/4.2.0/openmary-standalone-install-4.2.0.jar

This is a feature release, adding new features while maintaining 
compatibility with existing 4.x voices.

This release marks the final results of work on MARY TTS in the  SEMAINE 
project (http://www.semaine-project.eu/), where our main focus for TTS 
has been on building expressive British English voices with listener 
vocalization capabilities.

New features for synthesis of expressive vocalizations:

     * Improved support for expressive vocalizations in the British 
English unit selection voices dfki-poppy, dfki-prudence, dfki-spike and 
dfki-obadiah. Signal modification is now used to combine intonation 
contours and segmental forms, as described in  Pammi et al. (2010) 
(http://www.dfki.de/lt/publication_show.php?id=4886).
     * Added vocalization support to the HMM-based versions of these 
voices: dfki-poppy-hsmm, dfki-prudence-hsmm, dfki-spike-hsmm and 
dfki-obadiah-hsmm.

For details on the new MaryXML <vocalization> tag and usage examples, 
see http://mary.opendfki.de/wiki/VocalizationSynthesis

New voice:

     * For German, we created bits1-hsmm, a female HMM-based voice built 
from recordings provided by BITS 
(http://www.phonetik.uni-muenchen.de/Forschung/BITS/index.html)

Bugfixes:

     * This release also includes a number of bugfixes, see
 
http://mary.opendfki.de/query?status=closed&group=resolution&milestone=4.2






-- 
Dr. Marc Schröder, Senior Researcher at DFKI GmbH
Coordinator EU FP7 Project SEMAINE http://www.semaine-project.eu
Project leader for DFKI in SSPNet http://sspnet.eu
Project leader PAVOQUE http://mary.dfki.de/pavoque
Associate Editor IEEE Trans. Affective Computing http://computer.org/tac
Editor W3C EmotionML Working Draft http://www.w3.org/TR/emotionml/
Portal Editor http://emotion-research.net
Team Leader DFKI TTS Group http://mary.dfki.de

Homepage: http://www.dfki.de/~schroed
Email: marc.schroeder at dfki.de
Phone: +49-681-85775-5303
Postal address: DFKI GmbH, Campus D3_2, Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3, D-66123 
Saarbrücken, Germany
--
Official DFKI coordinates:
Deutsches Forschungszentrum fuer Kuenstliche Intelligenz GmbH
Trippstadter Strasse 122, D-67663 Kaiserslautern, Germany
Geschaeftsfuehrung:
Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Wolfgang Wahlster (Vorsitzender)
Dr. Walter Olthoff
Vorsitzender des Aufsichtsrats: Prof. Dr. h.c. Hans A. Aukes
Amtsgericht Kaiserslautern, HRB 2313