Speech Technology :: WISPR Project
The WISPR Project (Welsh and Irish Speech Processing Resources) Project was a major project, funded by the EU "Interreg" programme. Additional funding was provided by the Welsh Language Board.
The project's aim was to develop text-to-speech synthesis for the Welsh and Irish languages, together with collecting speech databases for those languages. It was developed jointly by the Language Technologies Unit at Canolfan Bedwyr, University of Wales, Bangor, and Trinity College Dublin, with support from Dublin City University and University College Dublin.
Very little work had previously been done on developing speech technology tools for the Welsh and Irish languages. The WISPR team members believe that the best way to disseminate speech technology in a minority language environment is to provide freely distributable tools and applications that are easy for the end user to use and liberally licensed to permit developers to integrate into their own software.
Text-to-Speech Synthesis
Text-to-speech synthesis (TTS) allows a computer to read text out aloud. It is distinct from machine translation, since in TTS the text is not translated, simply read out. It can be used in screenreaders for visually impaired people, which read out the contents of the computer screen, such as e-mails and web pages (sometimes at great speed). It can also be of use when interacting with a computer system over a telephone. More recent applications involving mobile phones will be able to use TTS for such tasks as reading out messages.
The WISPR project used the popular open-source "Festival" framework for TTS. Some enhancements to Festival were developed by the Welsh WISPR team, such as allowing Festival to cope with input text in UTF-8 format (so that all possible characters in Welsh could be handled).
Festival was developed originally at the Centre for Speech Technology Research, University of Edinburgh, and subsequently at Carnegie-Mellon University, USA, under the "Festvox" project..
WISPR outputs
All the resources and applications developed during the WISPR project are free of charge, and available for download from the following link:
In addition, all source code is openly available according to a BSD-style license. This ensures the fewest restrictions possible, so that the WISPR speech technology outputs can be used with a wide range of software, including proprietary and open source software.