- From: Marc Schroeder <marc.schroeder@dfki.de>
- Date: Thu, 09 Sep 2010 17:17:12 +0200
- To: public-xg-htmlspeech@w3.org
Hi all, let me try and bring the TTS topic into the discussion. I am the core developer of DFKI's open source MARY TTS platform http://mary.dfki.de/, written in pure Java. Our TTS server provides an HTTP based interface with a simple AJAX user frontend (which you can try at http://mary.dfki.de:59125/); we are currently sending synthesis results via a GET request into an HTML 5 <audio> tag, which works (in Firefox 3.5+) but seems suboptimal in some ways. I think <audio> is suboptimal even for server-side TTS, for the following reasons/requirements: * <audio> provides no temporal structure of the synthesised speech. One feature that you often need is to know the time at which a given word is spoken, e.g., - to highlight the word in a visual rendition of the speech; - to synchronize with other modalities in a multimodal presentation (think of an arrow appearing in a picture when a deictic is used -- "THIS person", or of a talking head, or gesture animation in avatars); - to know when to interrupt (you might not want to cut off the speech in the middle of a sentence) * For longer stretches of spoken output, it is not obvious to me how to do "streaming" with an <audio> tag. Let's say a TTS can process one sentence at a time, and is requested to read an email consisting of three paragraphs. At the moment we would have to render the full email on the server before sending the result, which prolongs time-to-audio much more than necessary, for a simple transport/scheduling reason: IIRC, we need to indicate the Content-Length when sending the response, or else the audio wouldn't be played... * There are certain properties of speech output that could be provided in an API, such as gender of the voice, language of the text to be spoken, preferred pronounciations, etc. -- of course SSML comes to mind (http://www.w3.org/TR/speech-synthesis11/ -- congratulations for reaching Recommendation status, Dan!) BTW, I have seen a number of emails on the whatwg list and here taking an a priori stance regarding the question whether ASR (and TTS) would happen in the browser ("user agent", you guys seem to call it) or on the server. I don't think the choice is a priori clear, I am sure there are good use cases for either choice. The question is whether there is a way to cater for both in an HTML speech API... Best for now, Marc -- please note my NEW phone number: +49-681-85775-5303 Dr. Marc Schröder, Senior Researcher at DFKI GmbH Coordinator EU FP7 Project SEMAINE http://www.semaine-project.eu Project leader for DFKI in SSPNet http://sspnet.eu Project leader PAVOQUE http://mary.dfki.de/pavoque Associate Editor IEEE Trans. Affective Computing http://computer.org/tac Editor W3C EmotionML Working Draft http://www.w3.org/TR/emotionml/ Portal Editor http://emotion-research.net Team Leader DFKI TTS Group http://mary.dfki.de Homepage: http://www.dfki.de/~schroed Email: marc.schroeder@dfki.de Phone: +49-681-85775-5303 Postal address: DFKI GmbH, Campus D3_2, Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3, D-66123 Saarbrücken, Germany -- Official DFKI coordinates: Deutsches Forschungszentrum fuer Kuenstliche Intelligenz GmbH Trippstadter Strasse 122, D-67663 Kaiserslautern, Germany Geschaeftsfuehrung: Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Wolfgang Wahlster (Vorsitzender) Dr. Walter Olthoff Vorsitzender des Aufsichtsrats: Prof. Dr. h.c. Hans A. Aukes Amtsgericht Kaiserslautern, HRB 2313
Received on Thursday, 9 September 2010 15:17:48 UTC