Following significant restructuring introduced in v5.0, this is a milestone release to stabilize numerous new features and fixes over the past two years.
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Apart from numerous fixed issues, there are several notable improvements in this version.
Thanks to Sathish Pammi’s work at ENST and UPMC in Paris, there is support for French TTS. This supersedes an earlier, experimental implementation, which relied on external, native resources with an incompatible license.
Moreover, thanks to the great work and generosity of the speakers, there are a number of French voices built from three open-source corpora:
Thanks to Fabio Tesser and Giulio Paci at ISTC in Padova, numerous improvements were made to Italian TTS.
This also includes the resurrection of the HTK Labeler used for voicebuilding as an alternative to the EHMM Labeler, which may produce better results under certain conditions.
Although much of the documentation has yet to be updated, the MaryTTS website itself is now built directly from the MaryTTS source code (using the Maven Site Plugin). This unifies the fossilized legacy content with new documentation, including the GitHub-hosted wiki, and makes it easy to manage.
Finally, thanks to cloud hosting at Bintray, it is now possible to integrate MaryTTS directly into other applications without the requirement to install it first locally, simply by adding the following repository block to your pom.xml:
<repository> <id>bintray</id> <url>https://dl.bintray.com/marytts/marytts</url> </repository>
There has been some fluctuation in the core development team since the release of v5.0; departures and other responsibilities have resulted in less activity than we would have liked.
Fortunately, we do finally have several new projects for MaryTTS, and several exciting features waiting the wings, ready to be rebased on a stable version (this one), including major overhauls of the voicebuilding toolchain and the new language support, and a new web-based installer. Expect these to land in the near future.