The goal of the MBROLA project is to obtain a set a high quality speech synthesizers for as many languages as possible, free for use in non-commercial applications. The ultimate goal is to boost up academic research on speech synthesis, and particularly on prosody generation, known as one of the biggest challenges in Text-to-Speech Synthesis for the years to come. Brazilian Portuguese, Breton, British English, Dutch, French, German, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish and now Italian! are already available as full software multilingual speech synthesizers (i.e., the DSP part of a TTS system). Many other languages are in preparation.

MBROLA is a speech synthesizer based on the concatenation of diphones developed at the FacultÈ Polytechnique de Mons, TCTS Lab. in Mons, Belgium

Central to the MBROLA project is MBROLA, a speech synthesizer based on the concatenation of diphones. It takes a list of phonemes as input, together with prosodic information (duration of phonemes and a piecewise linear description of pitch), and produces speech samples on 16 bits (linear), at the sampling frequency of the diphone database used (it is therefore NOT a Text-To-Speech (TTS)synthesizer, since it does not accept raw text as input). This synthesizer is provided for free, for non commercial, non military applications only.

Diphone databases tailored to the Mbrola format are needed to run the synthesizer. A French voices have been made available by the authors of MBROLA, and the MBROLA project has itself been organized so as to incite other research labs or companies to share their diphone databases and, finally,..................... MBROLA speaks Italian!