DEMOSTHENES
DEMOSTHENES is syllable based TTS system (primarily oriented to the Czech language) developed at the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University Brno.
Important reason for the development of DEMOSTHENES is supporting visually impaired people. The system is based on the following principles:
- open architecture;
- portability;
- modularity;
- flexibility;
- the system is developed and tested in cooperation with United Organization of Blind and Visually Impaired People of the Czech Republic.
The system is designed for use under MS-DOS, UNIX, WINDOWS 95 and WINDOWS NT operating systems. (MS-DOS versions are still very often used by the blind people - the graphical interface of Windows operating system is not much friendly for them and UNIX is often deprecated as too complicated.)
The system uses its own library of procedures for sound card and DMA (Direct Memory Access) programming and is written in C++ programming language.
DEMOSTHENES is a full software realization of TTS system, i.e. no special hardware is required. It has minimal hardware requirements: IBM PC compatible computer (80486 or higher) supplied with SoundBlaster compatible sound card.
In present, basic modules of the system are assembled and tested. This is a (VERY PRELIMINARY) sample of synthesized speech of DEMOSTHENES based on testing segments database containing low quality data.
Sample of the synthesized speech of DEMOSTHENES ("Dobry den preje syntetizer DEMOSTHENES" - in Czech, = "The synthesizer DEMOSTHENES wishes you good day").Head of the Project
Ivan Kopecek
Faculty of Informatics, Botanicka 68a,
60200 Brno, Czech Republic
E-mail:
kopecek@fi.muni.cz WWW: http://www.fi.muni.cz/~kopecek/Team (in alphabetical ordering)
Robert Batusek, Pavel Gaura, Ivan Kopecek, Karel Pala
References:
http://www.fi.muni.cz/~kopecek/pub.htm