News and Updates

A Reference Implementation is currently not available from Sun — please review the FAQ for information on third party implementations.

September 2002:

The Speech Group in Sun Microsystem Laboratories in Burlington, Massachusetts, has released FreeTTS 1.1.1, the latest version of an open source speech synthesis engine written entirely in the Java programming language. FreeTTS 1.1.1 includes new suport for the MBROLA binaries as well as a Java WebStart demo. Please visit the FreeTTS project page for more information.

December 2001:

Duke Speaks! The Speech Group in Sun Microsystem Laboratories in Burlington, Massachusetts, has created an open source speech synthesis engine written entirely in the Java programming language. Please visit the FreeTTS project page for more information.

June 2001:

JSAPI is going through the Java Community Process. The Java Specification Request JSR-113 has been approved and the specification lead has been identified as Conversay. The target platform is the J2ME space, with the expectation that the core API will allow growth into the desktop and telephony spaces. The expert group is currently forming.

An overview of the Java Community Process can be found at www.jcp.org.

The Java Speech API allows developers to incorporate speech technology into user interfaces for their Java programming la nguage applets and applications. This API specifies a cross-platform interface to support command and control recognizers, dictation systems and speech synthesizers. The 1.0 specification is available for free public download and review.

Do you want to program with the Java Speech API? Then check out this list of available JSAPI implementations.

Sun has also developed the Java Speech Grammar Format (JSGF) to provide cross-platform control of speech recognizers. The JSGF specification is also available for download.

To provide cross-platform control of speech synthesizers, Sun is developing the Java Speech Markup Language (JSML). The beta of the JSML specification is now available for review.

The Java Speech API was developed by Sun Microsystems, Inc. in collaboration with leading speech technology companies: Apple Computer, Inc., AT&T, Dragon Systems, Inc., IBM Corporation, Novell, Inc., Philips Speech Processing, and Texas Instruments Incorporated.

December 2001:
Duke Speaks! The Speech Group in Sun Microsystem Laboratories in Burlington, Massachusetts, has created an open source speech synthesis engine written entirely in the Java programming language. Please visit the FreeTTS project page for more information.

June 2001:
The Java Specification Request JSR-113 has been approved and the specification lead has been identified as Conversay.