festival-freebsoft-utils 0.6 released
=====================================

The Free(b)soft project is pleased to announce
festival-freebsoft-utils 0.6.

* 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 0.5 and 0.6 versions?

  - SSML mode implementation was rewritten to improve operation with
    Speech Dispatcher and to provide better and cleaner framework for
    future more complete SSML support.  SSML spelling support was added,
    on the other hand SSML prosody settings remained unimplemented on
    the synthesis level in this version.

  - New utility functions `min' and `max'.

  - Manual licensed under both GFDL and GPL.

  - Bug fixes.

NOTE: If you use festival-freebsoft-utils with Speech Dispatcher, you
must install Speech Dispatcher 0.5 or higher.  There was an incompatible
change in the Speech Dispatcher Festival interface that prevents the new
festival-freebsoft-utils versions 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-0.5.tar.gz .

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


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