ML-FLite

Multilanguage FLite

(English and Italian voices)

 

 

ML-FLite (Multilanguage FLite) is a portable C library dedicated to text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis.

The library is based on FLite version 1.3 (http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/flite/) originally developed by Alan Black and Kevin Lenzo at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU).

The original version of FLite supports only the english language. For the other languages, like italian, the original library cannot be used.

Some months after the release of the version 1.2 of the CMU FLite library, Piero Cosi and Fabio Tesser, two researchers of the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies (CNR-ICST Padova) have released a module for italian voice in Festival and a program called Italian-FLite.

 

Italian-Flite is based on the the italian version of Festival. Italian-Flite and the italian version of Festival are the result of a collaboration between CNR-ISTC and the Istituto Trentino di Cultura - Centre for Scientific and Technological Research (ITC-IRST now Bruno Kessler Foundation).

 

Italian-FLite is very good, but unfortunately it is based on MBROLA synthesis engine, so it is not fully portable. Furthermore, it is based on the old version 1.2 of the original CMU FLite library.

Filippo Battaglia, a researcher of Visilab Research Center of the University of Messina, has integrated the core of the CMU FLite library (version 1.3), the LPC database and the italian lexicon provided by ICST-CNR Institute, and the LPC databases for english voices that have been originally provided by Carnegie Mellon University.

The result is ML-FLite, a portable, fully optimized, library for text-to-speech synthesis, able to use both italian and english voices without differences.

 

Sponsors

 

ML-FLite has been developed by CECUM (Centro di calcolo Università di Messina) in collaboration with VISILAB (Computer Vision and Human-Computer Interaction Lab, University of Messina) with the support of the governmental project "Innovazione nell'area dello stretto", sponsored by CNIPA (Centro Nazionale per l'Informatica nella Pubblica Amministrazione - Italy).

Features

• Supports english voices (KAL, KAL16, AWBTime) and an italian voice (IT_PC);

• The system is based on LPC (Linear Predictive Coding);

• The required databases are fully contained in static libraries: no external program is required;

• Fully portable on any embedded platform;

• Fully optimized;

• Compatible with diphone databases for FLite 1.2 or FLite 1.3 (the library executes automatically the
  appropriate conversion routine);

• English and Italian lexicons provided;

• Expandable with other languages;

• Compatible with Linux and ALSA Sound System.

Supported platforms

 

In this section you can download the versions for x86 cpu and for Sony Playstation Portable (PSP) (for Nanodesktop 0.4 users only).

 

Starting from Nanodesktop 0.5, a copy of ML-FLite is already included in the standard distribution, so no additional download is required.

 

Downloads

 

Download ML-FLite version 1.4 for x86 platform

(it requires Linux Ubuntu and ALSA support in Linux kernel)

 

Download ML-FLite version 1.4 for Nanodesktop PSPE/PSP

(For Nanodesktop 0.4 users. The version 0.5 of the nd distribution already contains ML-FLite)

 

Here you can download a demo for italian voice ready to be installed on Playstation Portable

 

Download ML-FLite demo for Playstation Portable (italian voice)

(It is compiled using Nanodesktop 0.5 - PSP HAL)

License and terms of use

MLFLite is free software. You can redistribute it under the terms of GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).  See the file README.PDF for further details.

 

This project is mantained by Filippo Battaglia. If you have some questions about it, you can contact me at the mail address: filbattaglia@libero.it