The purpose of the project is making a good freely redistributable and usable Czech diphone database for the Festival speech synthesis system. Together with the festival-czech project it provides a complete freely redistributable and usable Czech speech synthesis.
Although the database is intended primarily for the Festival speech synthesis system, it is not limited to Festival. The database contains complete phone boundary marks and diphone boundaries and can be used to make voices for other free speech synthesis systems.
You can listen to voice demo.
Czech Festival speech synthesis, including festival-czech and 1 voice voice-czech-ph, was developed by Brailcom, o.p.s., Nadační fond Českého rozhlasu, Seznam.cz, a.s. and European Commission (the Leonardo da Vinci program) provided financial contributions to the project. Institute of Phonetics at Faculty of Philosophy & Arts, Charles University, Prague, led by prof. PhDr. Zdena Palková, CSc. provided expert knowledge and consultations.
The 3 other Czech voices, voice-czech-krb, voice-czech-dita and voice-czech-machac, were created by PhDr. Pavel Machač, Ph.D. and Mgr. Radek Skarnitzl, Ph.D. from Institute of Phonetics, Faculty of Philosophy & Arts, Charles University in Prague. Technical support was provided by Brailcom, o.p.s.. They were created and developed within the projects "Olomouc Chance for Blind Pupils" (reg. number CZ.1.07/1.2.12/02.0015) and "Support Center for Visually Impaired Pupils" (reg. number CZ.1.07/1.2.00/14.0111), which are co-financed from European Social Fund and Czech Republic's state budget.