= Voice Import Tools Tutorial : How to build a new Voice with Voice Import Tools =

This Tutorial explains the procedure to build a new voice with Voice Import Tools (VIT) under MARY Environment.

Voice Import Tool is a Graphical User Interface(GUI), which contains a set of Voice Import Components and helps the user to build new voices under MARY(Modular Architecture for Research in speech sYnthesis) Environment. This GUI Tool designing is primarily aims to build new voices very easily by any user with out knowing much technical details of Speech Synthesis.

Currently, Voice Import Tool supports following  categories mainly:

  1. Feature Extraction from Acoustic Data
  2. Feature Vector Extraction from Text Data
  3. Automatic Labeling
  4. Unit Selection
  5. Voice Installation to MARY 


== Requirements Needed: ==


 * Operating System - Linux (Recommended)
 * MARY TTS Recent Version 
 * Openmary 

(we also able to use Windows also, if we can able to compile properly the following dependent tools.)


== Dependendent Tools:  ==


 - Praat Pitch Marker or Snack  - For pitch marks
 
  Download Link for praat : http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat
	
 - Edinburgh Speech Tools Library – For MFCCs and Wagon (CART)
 
  Download Link for Speech Tools: http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/speech_tools/

 - EHMM or Sphinx – For Automatic Labeling

  EHMM is available with festvox-2.1 (Recent Version) - http://festvox.org/download.html

  Sphinx -  http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/webpage/html/download.php


== Voice Import Components: ==


Following Components are available with Voice Import Components:

 - !PraatPitchmarker
 - !SnackPitchmarker
 - MCEPMaker
 - Mary2FestvoxTranscripts
 - Festvox2MaryTranscripts
 - !PhoneUnitFeatureComputer
 - !HalfPhoneUnitFeatureComputer
 - EHMMLabeler
 - !SphinxLabelingPreparator
 - !SphinxTrainer
 - !SphinxLabeler
 - MRPALabelConverter
 - !HalfPhoneUnitfileWriter
 - !HalfPhoneFeatureFileWriter
 - !JoinCostFileMaker 
 - !AcousticFeatureFileWriter
 - CARTBuilder
 - CARTPruner
 - !VoiceInstaller 



== How to run? ==

1. Create a new Voice Building Directory 
  
   - Put all Wave files in "wav" directory
   - Put corresponding text files(in MARY Format) in "text" directory 
 
2. Run below commands through Shell script from Voice Building Directory.


{{{

export MARY_BASE="/path/to/mary"
java -Xmx1024m -classpath $MARY_BASE/java:$MARY_BASE/java/mary-common.jar: \ 
$MARY_BASE/java/signalproc.jar:$MARY_BASE/java/freetts.jar:$MARY_BASE/java/jsresources.jar: \
$MARY_BASE/java/log4j-1.2.8.jar -Djava.endorsed.dirs=$MARYBASE/lib/endorsed \
de.dfki.lt.mary.unitselection.voiceimport.DatabaseImportMain

}}}

GUI is looking like below (Which supports voice building):

{{{
#!html
<p>
<img src="http://www.dfki.de/~chandra/VIC/VIC1.jpg" align="middle">
</p>
}}}




( '''Under Construction''' - to continued)