Support for 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 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="fast" pitch="+10%" contour="(10%,low)(50%,-20%)(80%,+10%)(100%,+5st)">
    Welcome to the world of speech synthesis!
   </prosody>
  </p>
</maryxml>