Festival Speech Synthesis System: - Speech Resource Pages

10. XML/SGML mark-up
The ideas of a general, synthesizer system nonspecific, mark-up language for labelling text has been under discussion
for some time. Festival has supported an SGML based markup language through multiple versions most recently
STML (sproat97). This is based on the earlier SSML (Speech Synthesis Markup Language) which was supported by
previous versions of Festival (taylor96). With this version of Festival we support Sable a similar mark-up language
devised by a consortium from Bell Labls, Sub Microsystems, AT&T and Edinburgh, sable98. Unlike the previous
versions which were SGML based, the implementation of Sable in Festival is now XML based. To the user they
different is negligable but using XML makes processing of files easier and more standardized. Also Festival now
includes an XML parser thus reducing the dependencies in processing Sable text.
Raw text has the problem that it cannot always easily be rendered as speech in the way the author wishes. Sable
offers a well-defined way of marking up text so that the synthesizer may render it appropriately.
The definition of Sable is by no means settled and is still in development. In this release Festival offers people
working on Sable and other XML (and SGML) based markup languages a chance to quickly experiment with
prototypes by providing a DTD (document type descriptions) and the mapping of the elements in the DTD to Festival
functions. Although we have not yet (personally) investigated facilities like cascading style sheets and generalized
SGML specification languages like DSSSL we believe the facilities offer by Festival allow rapid prototyping of
speech output markup languages.
Primarily we see Sable markup text as a language that will be generated by other programs, e.g. text generation
systems, dialog managers etc. therefore a standard, easy to parse, format is required, even if it seems overly verbose
for human writers.
For more information of Sable and access to the mailing list see
http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/sable.html
10.1 Sable example an example of Sable with descriptions
10.2 Supported Sable tags Currently supported Sable tags
10.3 Adding Sable tags Adding new Sable tags
10.4 XML/SGML requirements Software environment requirements for use
10.5 Using Sable Rendering Sable files as speech
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10.1 Sable example
Here is a simple example of Sable marked up text