mimic: A C repository from 0x6C38

#Mimic - The Mycroft TTS Engine

Mimic is a fast, lightweight Text-to-speech engine developed by Mycroft A.I. and VocaliD, based on Carnegie Mellon University’s Flite (Festival-Lite) software. Mimic takes in text and reads it out loud to create a high quality voice.

######Official project site: mimic.mycroft.ai

##Supported platforms

Linux (ARM & Intel architectures)
Mac OS X
Windows

Untested

Android

Future

##Requirements

###Linux

A good C compiler (Recommended: gcc or clang)
GNU make
automake and libtool
pkg-config
ALSA/PortAudio/PulseAudio (Recommended: ALSA)
ICU library and headers

####Instructions

Install gcc, make, automake, libtool, pkg-config, libicu-dev and ALSA

#####On Debian/Ubuntu

$ sudo apt-get install gcc make pkg-config automake libtool libicu-dev libasound2-dev

###Mac OSX

A good C compiler. (Recommended: gcc or clang)
GNU make
pkg-config
PortAudio
ICU library

####Instructions

Install Brew

$ /usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

Install pkg-config, libtool, icu and PortAudio

$ brew install pkg-config libtool portaudio icu4c

###Windows

Cross compiling:

The fastest and most straightforward way to build mimic for windows is by cross-compilation from linux.

From a debian based linux system, install the dependencies, including mingw32 packages. Install wine too for testing

Install dependencies:

sudo apt-get install gcc make pkg-config automake libtool libicu-dev mingw32 mingw32-runtime wine

Run the windows build script:

./run_testsuite.sh winbuild

Test it

The directory install will contain bin/mimic.exe file

wine ./mimic.exe -t "hello world"

Distribute it

You can distribute the compiled mimic by adding to a zip file everything in the install/bin directory.

Native Windows building

A good C compiler (Recommended: GCC under Cygwin or mingw32)
GNU Make
PortAudio
ICU

######Note

Audio device and audio libraries are optional, as mimic can write its output to a waveform file
Some of the source files are quite large, that some C compilers might choke on these. So, gcc is recommended.
Visual C++ 6.0 is known to fail on the large diphone database files
The build process is much slower on Windows.

##Build

Clone the repository

$ git clone https://github.com/MycroftAI/mimic.git

Navigate to mimic directory
```
$ cd mimic
```
Generate build scripts
```
$ ./autogen.sh
```
Configure
```
$ ./configure
```
Build
```
$ make
```
Check
```
$ make check
```

######Note

If changes were made to the compile flags after building, run make clean before recompiling with make.

##Usage

####Read text

To an audio device

$ mimic -t TEXT

Example

$ ./bin/mimic -t "Hello. Doctor. Name. Continue. Yesterday. Tomorrow."

To an audio file

$ mimic -t TEXT -o WAVEFILE

Example

$ ./bin/mimic -t "Hello. Doctor. Name. Continue. Yesterday. Tomorrow." -o hello.wav

######Note

Wave file will be an 8KHz riff headered waveform file. riff is Microsoft's wave format often called .WAV)

####Read text from file

To an audio device

$ mimic -f TEXTFILE

Example

$ ./bin/mimic -f doc/alice

To an audio file

$ mimic -f TEXTFILE -o WAVEFILE`

Example

$ ./bin/mimic -f doc/alice -o hello.wav

######Note

Wave file will be an 8KHz riff headered waveform file. riff is Microsoft's wave format often called .WAV)

####Change voice

List available internal voices
```
$ mimic -lv
```

Use an internal voice

$ mimic -t TEXT -voice VOICE

Example

$ ./bin/mimic -t "Hello" -voice slt

Use an external voice file

$ mimic -t TEXT -voice VOICEFILE

Example

$ ./bin/mimic -t "Hello" -voice voices/cmu_us_slt.flitevox

Use an external voice url

$ mimic -t TEXT -voice VOICEURL

Example

$ ./bin/mimic -t "Hello" -voice http://www.festvox.org/flite/packed/flite-2.0/voices/cmu_us_ksp.flitevox

######Note

kal (diphone) voice is a different technology from the others and is much less computationally expensive but more robotic
Voice names are identified as loadable files if the name includes a "/" (slash) otherwise they are treated as internal names
The voices/ directory contains several flitevox voices. Existing Flite voices can be found here: http://www.festvox.org/flite/packed/flite-2.0/voices/
The voice referenced via an url will be downloaded on the fly
For each voice additional binaries that contain only that voice are created in ./bin/mimic_FULLVOICENAME, e.g. ./bin/mimic_cmu_us_awb . By default, -g is on so it will be bigger than is actually required

####Other options If no argument or "play" is given, it will attempt to write directly to the audio device (if supported). if "none" is given the audio is simply thrown away (used for benchmarking). Explicit options are also available.

./bin/mimic -v doc/alice none

will synthesize the file without playing the audio and give a summary of the speed.

An additional set of feature setting options are available, these are debug options, Voices are represented as sets of feature values (see lang/cmu_us_kal/cmu_us_kal.c) and you can override values on the command line. This can stop mimic from working if malicious values are set and therefore this facility is not intended to be made available for standard users. But these are useful for debugging. Some typical examples are

Use simple concatenation of diphones without prosodic modification
```
./bin/mimic --sets join_type=simple_join doc/intro.txt
```
Print sentences as they are said
```
./bin/mimic -pw doc/alice
```

Make it speak slower

./bin/mimic --setf duration_stretch=1.5 doc/alice

Make it speak higher

./bin/mimic --setf int_f0_target_mean=145 doc/alice

The talking clock is an example talking clode as discussed on http://festvox.org/ldom it requires a single argument HH:MM. Under Unix you can call it
```
./bin/mimic_time `date +%H:%M` 
```

##Debugging

The debug flag -g is already set when compiling. (This should probably be removed on release build)

######Note Currently the configure script enables compiler optimizations. These optimizations are the reason for any weird behavior while stepping through the code. (Due to the fact that the compiler has reordered/removed many lines of code.)

For now to disable optimizations edit the file mimic/config/config by hand. Near the top of the file change: CFLAGS = -g -O2 -Wall to read: CFLAGS = -g -O0 -Wall (You can also put any other debug flags here that you wish) Keep in mind that this file is auto generated by the configure script and will be overwritten if the script is run. Run make clean and then make to rebuild with the new flags.

Now, Run the program in the debugger

gdb --args ./bin/mimic -t "Hello. Doctor. Name. Continue. Yesterday. Tomorrow."

##How to Contribute For those who wish to help contribute to the development of mimic there are a few things to keep in mind.

####Git branching structure We will be using a branching struture similar to the one described in this article: http://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/ (a very interesting read)

#####In short

master branch is for stable releases,
development branch is where development work is done between releases,
Any feature branch should branch off from development, and when complete will be merged back into development.
Once enough features are added or a new release is complete those changes in development will be merged into master, then work can continue on development for the next release.

####Coding Style Requirements To keep the code in mimic coherent a simple coding style/guide is used. It should be noted that the current codebase as a whole does not meet some of these guidlines,this is a result of coming from the flite codebase. As different parts of the codebase are touched, it is the hope that these inconsistancies will diminish as time goes on.

Indentation

Each level of indentation is 4 spaces.

Braces

Braces always comes on the line following the statement.

Example

void cool_function(void)
{
    int cool;
    for (cool = 0; cool < COOL_LIMIT; cool++)
    {
        [...]
        if (cool == AWESOME)
        {
            [...]
        }
    }
}

If-statements

Always use curly braces.

Example

if(condition)
{                             /*always use curly braces even if the 'if' only has one statement*/
    DoJustThisOneThing();        
}

if(argv[i][2] == 'h' &&      /*split 'if' conditions to multiple lines if the conditions are long */
   argv[i][3] == 'e' &&      /*or if it makes things more readable. */
   argv[i][4] == 'l' && 
   argv[i][5] == 'p')
{
      /*example taken from args parsing code*/
      /* code */
}
else if(condition)
{
      /* code */
}
else
{
    /* code */
}

Switch-statements

Always keep the break statement last in the case, after any code blocks.

Example

switch(state)
{
    case 1:
    {               /* even if the case only has one line, use curly braces (similar reasoning as with if's) */ 
        doA(1);
    } break;
                        /* separate cases with a line */
    case 2:             /* unless it falls into the next one */
    case 3:
    {
        DoThisFirst();
    }                   /* no break, this one also falls through */
    case 4:
    {                   /* notice that curly braces line up with 'case' on line above */
        int b = 2;
        doA(b);
    } break;        /* putting 'break' on this line saves some room and makes it look a little nicer */

    case 5:
    {
        /* more code */
    } break;

    default:        /* It is nice to always have a default case, even if it does nothing */
    {
        InvalidDefaultCase(); /* or whatever, it depends on what you are trying to do. */
    }
}

Line length

There's no hard limit but if possible keep lines shorter than 80 characters.

#####Vimrc

For those of you who use vim, add this to your vimrc to ensure proper indenting.

"####Indentation settings
:filetype plugin indent on
" show existing tab with 4 spaces width
:set tabstop=4
" when indenting with '>', use 4 spaces width
:set shiftwidth=4
" On pressing tab, insert 4 spaces
:set expandtab
" fix indentation problem with types above function name
:set cinoptions+=t0
" fix indentation of { after case
:set cinoptions+==0
" fix indentation of multiline if
:set cinoptions+=(0   "closing ) to let vimrc hylighting work after this line

"see http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/indent.html#cinoptions-values
"for more indent options

#####Indent command (currently does not indent switch/cases properly)

indent [FILE] -npcs -i4 -bl -Tcst_wave -Tcst_wave_header -Tcst_rateconv \
      -Tcst_voice -Tcst_item -Tcst_features -Tcst_val -Tcst_va -Tcst_viterbi \
      -Tcst_utterance -Tcst_vit_cand_f_t -Tcst_vit_path_f_t -Tcst_vit_path \
      -Tcst_vit_point -Tcst_string -Tcst_lexicon -Tcst_relation \
      -Tcst_voice_struct -Tcst_track -Tcst_viterbi_struct -Tcst_vit_cand \
      -Tcst_tokenstream -Tcst_tokenstream_struct -Tcst_synth_module \
      -Tcst_sts_list -Tcst_lpcres -Tcst_ss -Tcst_regex -Tcst_regstate \
      -Twchar_t -Tcst_phoneset -Tcst_lts_rewrites -Tlexicon_struct \
      -Tcst_filemap -Tcst_lts_rules -Tcst_clunit_db -Tcst_cg_db \
      -Tcst_audio_streaming_info -Tcst_audio_streaming_info_struct -Tcst_cart \
      -Tcst_audiodev -TVocoderSetup -npsl -brs -bli0 -nut

##Acknowledgements see ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

##License See COPYING

0x6C38/mimic

Cross compiling:

Native Windows building