The MBROLA project: towards a set of high quality speech synthesizers free of use for non commercial purposes

The aim of the MBROLA project, initiated by the Faculte Polytechnique de Mons (Belgium), is to obtain a set of speech synthesizers for as many voices, languages and dialects as possible, free of use for non-commercial and non-military applications. The ultimate goal is to boost academic research on speech synthesis, and particularly on prosody generation, known as one of the biggest challenges taken up by text-to-speech synthesizers for the years to come. Central to the MBROLA project is MBROLA 2.00, a speech synthesizer based on the concatenation of diphones. Executable files of this synthesizer have been made freely available for many computers/operating systems, as well as a first diphone database for a French male voice. We describe the terms of participation to the project, as a user, as an associated developer, or as a database provider.