festival-freebsoft-utils 0.3 released

[Milan Zamazal]

festival-freebsoft-utils 0.3 released
=====================================

The Free(b)soft project is pleased to announce
festival-freebsoft-utils 0.3.

* 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 0.3 version?

  - New modules fileio.scm and recode.scm.

  - The Speech Dispatcher interface was changed to be compatible with
    Speech Dispatcher 0.5 and is not compatible with older Speech
    Dispatcher versions.

NOTE: If you use festival-freebsoft-utils with Speech Dispatcher, you
must install Speech Dispatcher 0.5 release candidate or higher.  There
was an incompatible change in the Speech Dispatcher Festival interface
that prevents the new festival-freebsoft-utils version to fully
cooperate with older Speech Dispatcher versions.

* 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-0.3.tar.gz
 .

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