3. Speech synthesis markup - Home - Verbio

The definition of Sable is by no means settled and is still indevelopment. In this release Festival offers people working on Sableand other XML (and SGML) based markup languages a chance to quicklyexperiment with prototypes by providing a DTD (document typedescriptions) and the mapping of the elements in the DTD to Festivalfunctions. Although we have not yet (personally) investigated facilitieslike cascading style sheets and generalized SGML specification languageslike DSSSL we believe the facilities offer by Festival allow rapidprototyping of speech output markup languages.

Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) is an XML-based markup language, used in the generation of speech in a range of applications, including Windows, mobile, Web, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. SSML gives developers and content creators the ability to not only generate speech, but also control the finer aspects, such as pronunciation, inflection, pitch, and more. This is also known as "prosody," and I’ll get to that in just a moment.

Speech Synthesis Markup Language Quickstart - CODE …

Note that this method may be used for both XML based lamnguages and SGMLbased markup languages (though and external normalizing SGML parser isrequired in the SGML case). The type (XML vs SGML) is identifiedby the parameter in the tts text mode specification.

Festival is distributed with an XML parser developedby Richard Tobin of the Language Technology Group, University ofEdinburgh. Sable is set up as an XML text mode so nofurther requirements or external programs are required to synthesizefrom Sable marked up text (unlike previous releases). Note that is not a full validation parser and hence doesn’t check some aspectsof the file (tags within tags).

Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML)

At their simplest level, Alexa skills receive a String and return a String. Amazon handles the parsing of the voice, and even does some neat things to contextualise what it has heard – for example, adding metadata about dates and times in the request. The skill simply needs to use this input to generate a response (sometimes marked up with Speech Synthesis Markup Language metadata).

Raw text has the problem that it cannot always easily be rendered asspeech in the way the author wishes. Sable offers a well-defined way ofmarking up text so that the synthesizer may render it appropriately.

Speech Synthesis - Encyclopedia of Language & …

As most synthesizers already have their own idiosyncratic markup language, the simplest method for implementing a SABLE interpreter is by translating the SABLE tags directly into the particular synthesizer's own markup escape sequences. There are a number of free XML parsers, and such translations can even be done directly in languages such as PERL. A complete translation of the file in a pre-processing stage will be sufficient for many cases, though when the input files are very big, a more integrated approach may be required.

Speech synthesis markup languages can also ..

In addition to the attributes listed, every tag allows the MARK attribute, which sets an arbitrary mark. This can be used by specific SABLE-compliant TTS engines to report back to the calling application that it has reached the given location. The mechanism for marker callback is defined by each synthesizer implementation. The requirements are that a marker notification be timed to the point at which audio output reaches the mark, and that the notification include the MARK string.

Synthesizers (i.e., speech APIs) support unique markup syntax

When a particular engine does not support a tag it can (mostly) ignore the tag and simply synthesize the text contained within it. The tags are designed such that this is a reasonable fallback position as it is well known that different TTS engines may support quite different functionality. Where ignoring tags becomes problematic is in the SPEAKER and LANGUAGE tags.

The Concept of Speech Synthesis Markup Language - …

There is an ever increasing demand for speech synthesis (TTS) technology in various applications including e-mail reading, information access over the web, tutorial and language-teaching applications, and in assistive technology for users with various handicaps. Invariably, an application that was developed with a particular TTS system A cannot be ported, without a fair amount of additional work, to a new TTS system B, for the simple reason that the tag set used to control system A is completely different from those used to control system B. The large variety of tagsets used by TTS systems are thus a problem for the expanded use of this technology since developers are often unwilling to expend effort porting their applications to a new TTS system, even if the new system in question is of demonstrably higher quality than the one they are currently using.

Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) Generator …

To control additional aspects of AT&T Natural Voices you can use the SSML (Speech Synthesis Markup Language), which is an XML based markup language. It consists of a set of XML control tags that modify some aspect of synthesized speech. For example, you can instruct it to