Gnuspeech Does Its First Official Release For Free Speech Synthesis

The Gnuspeech project has announced its first official release as a speech synthesis from text free software system.

Gnuspeech describes itself as, "It is a play on words. This is a new (g-nu) 'event-based' approach to speech synthesis from text, that uses an accurate articulatory model rather than a formant-based approximation. It is also a GNU project, aimed at providing high quality text-to-speech output for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and other platforms. In addition, it provides comprehensive tools for psychophysical and linguistic experiments as well as for creating the databases for arbitrary languages...Gnuspeech is new approach to synthetic speech as well as a speech research tool. It comprises a true articulatory model of the vocal tract, databases and rules for parameter composition, a 70,000 word plus pronouncing dictionary, a letter-to-sound fall-back module, and models of English rhythm and intonation, all based on extensive research that sets a new standard for synthetic speech, and computer-based speech research."

This first release is marked as gnuspeech-0.9 and gnuspeechsa-0.1.5. If you're interested in more details, see the GNU.org project site.