The Centre for Speech Technology Research, The university of Edinburgh

The Edinburgh Speech Tools Library

The Edinburgh Speech Tools Library is a collection of C++ class, functions and related programs for manipulating the sorts of objects used in speech processing. It includes support for reading and writing waveforms, parameter files (LPC, Ceptra, F0) in various formats and converting between them. It also includes support for linguistic type objects and support for various label files and ngrams (with smoothing).

In addition to the library a number of programs are included. An intonation library which includes a pitch tracker, smoother and labelling system (using the Tilt Labelling system), a classification and regression tree (CART) building program called wagon. Also there is growing support for various speech recognition classes such as decoders and HMMs.

The Edinburgh Speech Tools Library is not an end in itself but designed to make the construction of other speech systems easy. It is for example to provided the underlying classes in the Festival Speech Synthesis System

The speech tools are currently distributed in full source form free for unrestricted use.

Documentation

The following documentation is also included with the library:

Current status

Version 1.2.3 is distributed with Festival 1.4.3, and is available via the Festival download page

Personnel


Funding

Funding for this is shared between a number of existing projects as the speech tools development greatly aids these projects. We are grateful to the following for their sponsorship: The Engineering and Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC grant GR/K54229), Sun Microsystems, BT Labs. Contact for more details.