== Support for explicit prosody specifications ==

 MARY TTS support explicit prosody specification using 'prosody' element as described in W3C Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) recommendations; and the different attributes in 'prosody' element like 'rate', 'pitch' and 'contour' are used as specifications to modify predicted phone durations and pitch contour before passing them to synthesizer.

 Example: 
 
 {{{
 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
 <maryxml version="0.4"
  xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
  xmlns=" http://mary.dfki.de/2002/MaryXML"
  xml:lang="en-US">
   <p>
    <prosody rate="fast" pitch="+10%" contour="(10%,low)(50%,-20%)(80%,+10%)(100%,+5st)">
     Welcome to the world of speech synthesis!
    </prosody>
   </p>
 </maryxml>
 }}}


 '''1. Adjusting Speech Rate'''
  
 Example 1: 
 
  {{{
 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
 <maryxml version="0.4"
  xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
  xmlns=" http://mary.dfki.de/2002/MaryXML"
  xml:lang="en-US">
   <p>
    <prosody rate="200%">
      I am now speaking twice as fast.
    </prosody>
   </p>
 </maryxml>
 }}}

 Example 2:

  {{{
 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
 <maryxml version="0.4"
  xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
  xmlns=" http://mary.dfki.de/2002/MaryXML"
  xml:lang="en-US">
   <p>
    <prosody rate="70%">
     I am now speaking 30% more slowly.
    </prosody>
   </p>
 </maryxml>
 }}}