https://github.com/crispinprojects/diphone-talker
Diphone Speech Synthesizer for speaking dates
https://github.com/crispinprojects/diphone-talker
date-reader diphone gtk4 speech-synthesizer
Last synced: 3 months ago
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Diphone Speech Synthesizer for speaking dates
- Host: GitHub
- URL: https://github.com/crispinprojects/diphone-talker
- Owner: crispinprojects
- License: lgpl-2.1
- Created: 2024-08-28T20:42:49.000Z (9 months ago)
- Default Branch: main
- Last Pushed: 2025-03-16T19:03:09.000Z (3 months ago)
- Last Synced: 2025-03-16T20:24:49.116Z (3 months ago)
- Topics: date-reader, diphone, gtk4, speech-synthesizer
- Language: C
- Homepage:
- Size: 16.1 MB
- Stars: 1
- Watchers: 1
- Forks: 0
- Open Issues: 0
-
Metadata Files:
- Readme: README.md
- License: LICENSE
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README
# Diphone Speech Synthesizer
A code example of a diphone speech synthesizer for speaking dates. It has been developed using C and [GTK4](https://docs.gtk.org/gtk4/) for Linux GTK desktops (GNOME, XFCE etc.).
A screenshot of the diphone talker is shown below.
## How is Speech Generated?
Words are formed as sequences of elementary speech units. A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound that distinguishes one word from another word and there are 44 phonemes in the English language. A diphone is a sound unit composed of two adjacent partial phonemes i.e. the second half of the first phoneme and the first half of the second phoneme. The synthesizer uses a set of pre-recorded diphone sound samples and concatenates diphone audio to produce speech output for a given text input.
The voice used by Diphone Talker is derivative work based on the diphone collection created by Alan W Black and Kevin Lenzo which is free for use for any purpose (commercial or otherwise) and subject to the light restrictions [detailed here](https://github.com/hypnaceae/DiphoneSynth/blob/master/diphones_license.txt). I have used the same licence for the voice that I have created. There is information about recording your own diphones [here](http://festvox.org/bsv/x2401.html) and in the speech synthesis lecture by Professor Alan W Black [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDjtEsOvouM&t=1459s).
## Sample Phrases
Some sample phrases for speaking dates are shown below
```
Thursday first May
Wednesday twenty fifth December Christmas
```
Pre-processing of input text is very limited at this stage just removing unwanted characters such as commas, exclamation marks and question marks.
## Build From Source
The C source code for the diphone speech synthesizer for reading out dates is provided in the src directory and has been developed using Debian Bookworm which uses GTK 4.8.
[Geany](https://www.geany.org/) can be used as a source code editor for opening, viewing and then compiling the Talk Calendar C code. Geany is lightweight and has an integrated terminal for building the application. To install the Geany IDE use the command below.
```
sudo apt install geany
```
Alternatively, the latest version of Geany can be built from source using autotools.
### Building on Debian Bookworm
To build diphone speech synthesizer from source you need the gcc compiler, GTK4, and GLIB development libraries. You need to install the following packages.
```
sudo apt install build-essential
sudo apt install libgtk-4-dev
sudo apt install libasound2-dev
```
The packages:
```
sudo apt install libglib2.0-dev
sudo apt install alsa-utils
```
are needed but should be installed by default.
To determine which version of GTK4 is running on a Debian system use the following terminal command.
```
dpkg -l | grep libgtk*
```
Use the MAKEFILE to compile the code. Just run "make" inside the source code folder.
```
make
```
To run the diphone talker from the terminal use
```
./talker
```
## Versioning
[SemVer](http://semver.org/) is used for versioning. The version number has the form 0.0.0 representing major, minor and bug fix changes.
## Author
* **Alan Crispin** [Github](https://github.com/crispinprojects)
## License
The project is licensed under LGPL v2.1.
## Project Status
Active.
## Acknowledgements
* [Diphone Source and License](https://github.com/hypnaceae/DiphoneSynth/blob/master/diphones_license.txt)
* Diphone collection and synthesis Alan W. Black and Kevin Lenzo [2000](https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~awb/papers/ICSLP2000_diphone.pdf)