NAME

       mbrola - multilingual software speech synthesizer

SYNOPSIS

       mbrola [options]<voice_database><pho_file>...<output_file>

DESCRIPTION

       mbrola is a  speech synthesizer  based  on the concatenation  of diphones. It takes a list
       of phonemes as input, together with prosodic information  (duration  of  phonemes   and  a
       piecewise  linear  description  of   pitch),  and  produces   speech  samples  on 16  bits
       (linear), at the sampling frequency of the diphone database.

       It is therefore NOT a Text-To-Speech  (TTS) synthesizer, since it does not accept raw text
       as  input.   In   order  to obtain  a full TTS system, you need to use this synthesizer in
       combination with a text processing system that produces phonetic  and  prosodic  commands.
       For instance, you may use package freephone to obtain complete English TTS.

       A  `-' instead of pho_file or output_file means stdin or stdout.  Extension of output_file
       ( raw, au, wav, aiff ) tells the wanted audio format.

OPTIONS

       mbrola understands following command line options.

       -h
              Show summary of options.

       -i
              Display the database information if any.

       -e
              Ignore fatal errors on unknown diphone.

       -c comment_char
              Set COMMENT char (escape sequence in pho files).

       -F flush_command
              Set FLUSH command name.

       -v volume
              Volume ratio. Float ratio applied to output samples.

       -f freq_ratio
              Frequency ratio. Float ratio applied to pitch points.

       -t time_ratio
              Time ratio. Float ratio applied to phone durations.

       -l voice_freq
              Voice frequency. Target frequency for voice quality in Hz.

       -R rename_list
              Phoneme rename list of the form: `a A b B ...'

       -C clone_list
              Phoneme clone list of the form: `a A b B ...'

       -I file
              Initialization file containing one command per line.  CLONE, RENAME,  VOICE,  TIME,
              FREQ, VOLUME, FLUSH, COMMENT, and IGNORE are available.

SEE ALSO

       freephone(1), sox(1).
       See /usr/share/doc/mbrola/readme.txt.gz for more info.

AUTHOR

       mbrola was written by Dr Thierry Dutoit <dutoit@tcts.fpms.ac.be>

       This  manual  page was written by Igor B. Poretsky <master@goga.energo.ru>, for the Debian
       project (but may be used by others).

                                           May 17, 2005                                 MBROLA(1)