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Mbrola Voices

The Mbrola project is a collection of diphone voices for speech synthesis. They do not include any text-to-phoneme translation, so this must be done by another program. The Mbrola voices are cost-free but are not open source. They are available from the Mbrola website at: http://www.tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/mbrola/mbrcopybin.html

eSpeak NG can be used as a front-end to Mbrola. It provides the spelling-to-phoneme translation and intonation, which Mbrola then uses to generate speech sound.

Voice Names

To use a Mbrola voice, eSpeak NG needs information to translate from its own phonemes to the equivalent Mbrola phonemes. This has been set up for only some voices so far.

The eSpeak NG voices which use Mbrola are named as:

mb-xxx

where xxx is the name of a Mbrola voice (e.g. mb-en1 for the Mbrola en1 English voice). These voice files are in eSpeak NG's directory espeak-ng-data/voices/mbrola.

The installation instructions below use the Mbrola voice "en1" as an example. You can use other mbrola voices for which there is an equivalent eSpeak NG voice in espeak-ng-data/voices/mbrola.

There are some additional eSpeak NG Mbrola voices which speak English text using a Mbrola voice for a different language. These contain the name of the Mbrola voice with a suffix -en. For example, the voice mb-de4-en will speak English text with a German accent by using the Mbrola de4 voice.

Windows Installation

The SAPI5 version of eSpeak NG uses the mbrola.dll.

  1. Install eSpeak. Include the voice mb-en1 in the list of voices during the eSpeak installation.

  2. Install the PC/Windows version of Mbrola (MbrolaTools35.exe) from: http://www.tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/mbrola/bin/pcwin/MbrolaTools35.exe.

  3. Get the en1 voice from: http://www.tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/mbrola/mbrcopybin.html.

  4. Unpack the archive, and copy the en1 data file (not the whole "en1" directory) into C:/Program Files/eSpeak/espeak-ng-data/mbrola.

  5. Use the voice espeak-MB-EN1 from the list of SAPI5 voices.

Linux Installation

From eSpeak NG version 44 onwards, eSpeak NG calls the mbrola program directly, rather than passing phoneme data to it using a pipe.

  1. To install the Linux Mbrola binary, download: http://www.tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/mbrola/bin/pclinux/mbr301h.zip.

  2. Unpack the archive, and copy and rename the file from: mbrola-linux-i386 to mbrola somewhere in your executable path (eg. /usr/bin/mbrola).

  3. Get the en1 voice from: http://www.tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/mbrola/mbrcopybin.html.

  4. Unpack the archive, and copy the en1 data file (not the whole "en1" directory) to /usr/share/mbrola/en1.

    NOTE: eSpeak will look for mbrola voices firstly in espeak-ng-data/mbrola and then in /usr/share/mbrola.

Usage

If you use the eSpeak NG voice such as mb-en1 then eSpeak NG will use the mbrola "en1" voice, e.g.:

espeak-ng -v mb-en1 "Hello world"

To generate mbrola phoneme data (.pho file) you can use:

espeak-ng -v mb-en1 -q --pho "Hello world"

or

espeak-ng -v mb-en1 -q --pho --phonout=out.pho "Hello world"

Mbrola Voice Files

eSpeak NG's voice files for Mbrola voices are in directory espeak-ng-data/voices/mbrola.
They contain a line: mbrola <voice> <translation>

e.g.

mbrola en1 en1_phtrans
  • <voice> is the name of the Mbrola voice.
  • <translation> is a translation file to convert between eSpeak phonemes and the equivalent Mbrola phonemes.

These are kept in: espeak-ng-data/mbrola_ph

Mbrola Phoneme Translation Data

Mbrola phoneme translation files specify translations from eSpeak NG phoneme names to mbrola phoneme names. They are referenced from voice files.

The source files are in phsource/mbrola. These are compiled using:

espeak-ng --compile-mbrola=<mbrola voice>

Each line in the mbrola phoneme translation file contains:

<control> <espeak ph1> <espeak ph2> <percent> <mbrola ph1> [<mbrola ph2>]

<control>

bit 0 skip the next phoneme
bit 1 match this and Previous phoneme
bit 2 only at the start of a word
bit 3 don't match two phonemes across a word boundary

<espeak ph1>

The eSpeak NG phoneme which is to be translated to an mbrola phoneme.

<espeak ph2>

If this field is not NULL, then the match only occurs if this field matches the next phoneme. If control bit 1 is set, then the previous rather than the next phoneme is matched. This field may also have the following values:

  • VWL matches any Vowel phoneme.

<percent>

If this field is zero then only one mbrola phoneme is used. If this field is non-zero, then two mbrola phonemes are used, and this value gives the percentage length of the first mbrola phoneme.

<mbrola ph1>

The mbrola phoneme to which the eSpeak NG phoneme is translated. This field may be NULL.

<mbrola ph2>

The second mbrola phoneme. This field is only used if the <percent> field is not zero.

The list is searched from start to finish, until a match is found. Therefore, a line with more specific match condition should appear before a line which matches the same eSpeak NG phoneme but with a more general condition.

The file dictsource/dict_phonemes lists the eSpeak NG phonemes which are used for each language. Translations for all these should be given in the mbrola phoneme translation file. In addition, some phonemes which are referenced from phoneme files (e.g. phsource/ph_language, phsource/phonemes) in lines such as:

beforenotvowel   l/
reduceto  a#  0

should also be included, even though they don't appear in dictsource/dict_phonemes.

If the language's *_list or *_rules files includes rules to speak words "as English" the mbrola phoneme translation file should include rules which translate English phonemes into near equivalents, so that they can spoken by the mbrola voice.