[orca-list] New Czech Festival voices krb, dita and machac released.

[Boris Dušek <dusek brailcom org>]

The Free(b)soft project is pleased to announce the release of three newly
recorded high-quality Czech voices [1] for Festival speech synthesizer. The voices
are:

* krb - Czech child male voice
* dita - Czech adult female voice
* machac - Czech adult male voice

Together with the previously released `ph' adult male voice, Czech users
now have much greater choice of high quality voices they can use with Festival,
and through Speech Dispatcher with other applications, like the GNOME Orca
screenreader.

All three new voices are already available in Debian unstable distribution
under the package names festvox-czech-krb, festvox-czech-dita and
festvox-czech-machac. This also means that they will be available in Ubuntu
Oneiric release (11.10).

These voices were created and developed within the projects "Olomouc Chance for
Blind Pupils" (reg. number CZ.1.07/1.2.12/02.0015) and "Support Center for
Visually Impaired Pupils" (reg. number CZ.1.07/1.2.00/14.0111), which are
co-financed from European Social Fund and Czech Republic's state budget.

These voices were created by PhDr. Pavel Machač, Ph.D. and Mgr. Radek Skarnitzl,
Ph.D. from Institute of Phonetics [2], Faculty of Philosophy & Arts, Charles
University in Prague.

Technical support was provided by Brailcom, o.p.s. [3].

[1]: http://devel.freebsoft.org/festival-czech-diphone-database
[2]: http://http://fu.ff.cuni.cz/en/
[3]: http://www.brailcom.org

Boris Dušek
Brailcom, o.p.s.