Bayonne, NJ — (press release excerpt) — With the latest GNU Bayonne beta release (1.1.2), we have greatly expanded support for and integration of automated text to speech synthesized voice systems. Using “flite” based text to speech synthesis engines, initially developed through Carnegie Mellon University, and commercial derivatives of “flite”, such as Cepstral's Theta, it is now possible to have fully… automated high quality voice synthesis for GNU Bayonne based telephony applications.

With this new release, we have also expanded upon application scripting support to enable the creation of applications that can either use synthesized voices, or pre-recorded samples, based on the GNU Bayonne server runtime and build configuration. This allows one to create standard GNU Bayonne telephony applications which will operate whether voice synthesis is available or not, as well as simplify the development and maintenance of such applications.

To improve synthesis performance, GNU Bayonne supports options for automatic caching of non-dynamic synthesized speech content. GNU Bayonne also supports active selection of different synthesized voices within scripting. In the future we will tie together synthesis with GNU Bayonne's existing support for XML parsing to provide a voice web browsing portal over the public telephone network.

While we have initially worked with integrating “flite” based text to speech synthesis systems with GNU Bayonne, we are interested in supporting other voice synthesis systems as well. Our long term goal is for GNU Bayonne to provide pervasent application driven interactive voice response in every voice communication medium possible. As part of this goal we are also interested in integrating automated speech recognition systems.

For additional information, visit the GNU Bayonne website. Information on CMU Flite is available here.

 
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