Announce: festival-freebsoft-utils 0.2 released

[Milan Zamazal]

festival-freebsoft-utils 0.2 released
=====================================

The Free(b)soft project is pleased to announce
festival-freebsoft-utils 0.2.

* What is festival-freebsoft-utils?

  festival-freebsoft-utils is a collection of Festival utilities that
  enhance Festival with some useful features.  They provide all what is
  needed for interaction with Speech Dispatcher.

  Key festival-freebsoft-utils features are:

  - Generalized concept of input events.  festival-freebsoft-utils
    allows not only plain text synthesis, but also combining it with
    sounds.  Additionally, mechanism of logical events mapped to other
    events is provided.

  - Substitution of events for given words.

  - High-level voice selection mechanism and setting of basic prosodic
    parameters.

  - Spelling mode.

  - Capital letter signalization.

  - Punctuation modes, for explicit reading or not reading punctuation
    characters.

  - Incremental synthesis of texts and events.

  - Speech Dispatcher support.

  - Rudimentary SSML support.

  - Enhancing the Festival extension language with some functions
    commonly used in Lisp.  Support for wrapping already defined
    Festival functions by your own code.

  - Everything is written in the extension language, no patching of the
    Festival C++ sources is needed.

* What is new in the 0.2 version?

  - Event handling mechanism was completely reworked to be cleaner and
    more robust.

  - Voice and language selection mechanism was generalized and
    simplified.

  - Incremental synthesis of texts and events, including utterance
    chunking implemented in the extension language.

  - Rudimentary SSML support.

  - New functions for unified setting of prosodic parameters and
    avoiding initial spaces.

  - New utility functions.

* Where to get it?
  
  You can get the distribution tarball of the released version from
  
http://www.freebsoft.org/pub/projects/festival-freebsoft-utils/festival-freebsoft-utils-0.2.tar.gz
 .

  The home page of the project is
  http://www.freebsoft.org/festival-freebsoft-utils .