Compost: a server for multilingual text-to-speech synthesis

This article presents a server which offers multilingual text-to-speech synthesis to connected clients . It describes the COMPOST environment which bas been created to give a complete answer ta this challenging idea : voice output will be fully integrated in man-machine dialog systems when hardware and software architectures will offer flexible and powerfull communication tools between text-to-speech systems and dialog systems . COMPOST consists of a specialised programing language for text-tospeech synthesis. Each text-to-speech system describes the different steps which convert a running text towards its acoustic andlor visual synthesis by means of a main program called a scenario . Each scenario is then compiled and may be downloaded into the working environment of the server . A normalised communication interface enables a real-time dialog between the server and the attached clients i.e . for using a tree-structure as input (synthesis by concepts), changing the voice quality, the language or the spelling mode . The ideas presented in this article are enlighted by concrete examples extracted from a text-to-speech system for French developped using COMPOST.Cet article présente la notion de serveur de synthèse et décrit l'environnement COMPOST qui a été créé pour répondre aux concepts que cette notion développe: l'intégration du dialogue vocal dans les interfaces homme-machine ne sera opérationnel que lorsque les architectures matérielles et logicielles offriront aux concepteurs de systèmes de synthèse et aux spécialistes du génie logiciel un moyen souple de communication. COMPOST propose aux premiers un langage de programmation de systèmes de synthèse multilingues et multi-entrées et aux derniers une infrastructure logicielle basée sur la notion de serveur-clien