Bug#594834: ITP: cicero -- French and English Text-To-Speech for MBROLA

[Samuel Thibault <sthibault@debian.org>]

Package: wnpp
Severity: wishlist
Owner: Samuel Thibault <sthibault@debian.org>


* Package name    : cicero
  Version         : 0.7.2
  Upstream Author : Nicolas Pitre <nico@cam.org>
* URL             : http://pages.infinit.net/fluxnic/cicero/
* License         : GPLv2, but depends on non-free MBROLA, thus targetting contrib.
  Programming Lang: Python
  Description     : French and English Text-To-Speech for MBROLA

This Text-To-Speech (TTS) engine speaks French; a preliminary English support
is also offered.
The engine uses context-sensitive rules to produce phonemes from the text. It
relies on MBROLA to generate actual audio output from the phonemes. The TTS
engine is implemented using the Python programming language.

The upstream authors have come up with this TTS to try and meet their own needs
as blind users.
It's designed to be plugged as output to some screen-review software, firstly
with BRLTTY.
They favor speed and intelligibility over perfect pronunciation.
Cicero is aimed to have a quick response time, the ability to quickly shut-up
and skip to another utterance, intelligibility where it counts (not perfect
pronunciation), the ability to track speech progression, relative simplicity
(hackability) and relative small code size.