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Text-to-speech synthesizers must process text, and therefore require some knowledge of text structure. While many TTS systems allow for user control by means of ad hoc escape sequences, there remains to date no adequate and generally agreed upon system-independent standard for marking up text for the purposes of synthesis. Sable is a recently formed consortium aimed at providing a single standard for speech synthesis markup. The consortium's principle aim is to merge the two existing proposed standard, namely STML developed by Bell Labs and Edinburgh, and JSML, developed by Sun. The present groups that are actively involved, or who have expressed an interest in this project include:

• Edinburgh University
• Bell Laboratories
• British Telecom
• AT&T
• Sun Microsystems
• Carnegie Mellon University

Release of the Sable v0.2 spec

The draft specification for Sable version 0.2

Sample Implementations

Festival-1.3.0 contains a basic implementation of Sable 0.2 in its standard distribution.

A more detailed and documented example implementation for the Bell Labs synthesizer is available from ftp://ftp.cstr.ed.ac.uk/pub/sable/blsable.tgz. This implements Sable by converting the tags to synthesizer specific escape sequences. This example is a good place to start if you wish to implement a sable interpreter for another synthesis system.

The Sable Mailing List

Bibliography of papers related to STML and JSML include:

• P. Taylor and A. Isard, "SSML: A speech synthesis markup language," Speech Communication, 1997.
• R. Sproat, P. Taylor, M. Tanenblatt and A. Isard, "A markup language for text-to-speech synthesis," Proceedings of EUROSPEECH 97, Rhodes, Greece.
• The Java Speech API incorperating JSML