Rio de Janeiro, 16/07/2006


Dear MBROLA TEAM,
In special, Dr. Thierry Dutoit and Dr. D'Alessandro.


First of all, thank you for the support on our work at Serpro,
preparing our voice synthesizer.

We have completed our database preparation (BR4).
We have followed your orientation, and we expect it is ok now.

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We are now submiting this database to the Mbrola Project for processing.

As stated in the instructions we tried to send it to the following ftp site:

	 ftp://tcts.fpms.ac.be/incoming/write-only

Unfortunately we have been unsuccesful to use it, because it's unaccesible.

So please get it (8mb approx.) in the following site:

http://intervox.nce.ufrj.br/~antonio2/serpro/br4_serpro_export_and_tests.zip

Inside the zip file there are two extra files: _test.pho and _test.wav
the first being a possible test of the database, and the second a real
speech of the same test (really similar not equivalent), produced by
the professional speaker (Liane Borges) whose voice is the source for
our database.

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We have also constructed a TTS compiler for portuguese, written in Delphi,
now perfectly functional but with a very crude prosody (pitch altered
by resampling and no facilities to modify diphones lenghts).  We intend
to make it available as a free software, as soon as the prosody becomes
minimally acceptable, to be studied and improved by the brazilian comunity.

We will be sending it to you for comments soon.  This is particulary
useful, because it can use the samples directly, which allows to test
the concatenation in real texts, without prosody, before the database
is being processed.

We think that, with some effort, it would be possible to make it
able to digitally process some crude pitch and length changes, thus
allowing the user to have a preview of the future mbrola processing.

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The license from Serpro has been sent to you weeks ago, and so we expect
everything is ok.  Please recheck this, if necessary.

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Please send a confirmation of this message, and give us the possible
delay to process our database.

Thanks in advance.
The Serpro TTS Team

Mauro Agostinho
Antonio Borges

Ok: Marcos Kinsky