It is with great pleasure that we announce the 1.2 release of FreeTTS: http://freetts.sourceforge.net/ In this release, we have provided the following new features and improvements over the 1.2 beta2 release: - Improvements to the emacspeak server demo - Performance improvements for time-to-first-sample and cancel - Improvements to the state name expansion logic (bug 1101229) - Pronunciations for British Sterling and "not" sign (bug 1100888) - New pronunciations for Linux terms (bug 1006630) - Clarifications to speech.properties message (rfe 1041437 and bug 1041296) - Fix for -dump{Multi}Audio problem in freetts app (bug 986503). - Elimination of hang with JDK1.5 (bug 1019337) - Tools specifically for importing CMU ARCTIC Voices. - Fix for MBROLA phoneme remapping (bug 1013781). - Rudimentary internationalization to FestVox import. - Support to build FreeTTS w/o requiring JSAPI - Only build tests on demand (more freedom from JUnit) FreeTTS is a speech synthesis system written entirely in the Java programming language. It is based upon Flite, a small, fast, run-time speech synthesis engine, which in turn is based upon University of Edinburgh's Festival Speech Synthesis System and Carnegie Mellon University's FestVox project. Many thanks to Alan Black and Kevin Lenzo for their hard work and contributions to speech synthesis research. In addition, many thanks to Marc Schroeder and his team in the Language Technology Lab at DFKI for their additions and improvements to FreeTTS. Sincerely, The FreeTTS Team: Philip Kwok (in alph. order) Paul Lamere Marc Schroeder Willie Walker (overall lead)