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HB2 - A Hebrew female voice for the MBROLA synthesizer

Created by :  Esther Raizen, The University of Texas at Austin

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Table of Contents
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1.0 Description of the HB2 diphone database
2.0 Installation and tests
3.0 Announcement
4.0 Acknowledgements

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1.0 Description of the HB2 diphone database
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HB2 is a diphone database  for  Hebrew, Israeli accent, consisting of 1008 diphones, female voice.

The following  phoneme  symbols are  used in recording  the database. 
They follow the SAMPA standard (http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/sampa/hebrew.htm) with the exception of Ts (parallel to the SAMPA ts). 

Following are the symbols and Hebrew words which include the respective sounds.
_       silence

Vowels: 
a	tan
e	tel
i	tik
o	tor
u	tur
ai	xai
ei	mei
oi	goi
ui	Satui

Consonants:
?	?ani
b	bor
g	gol
d	dor
h	har
v	vav
z	zer
X	Xor
t	tor
j	jom
k	kad
l	lul
m	mul
n	nul
s	sam
p	pil
Ts	Tsir
R	RoS
S	Sam

Consonants used in foreign words:
Z	masaZ
tS	tSips
dZ	dZins
N	baN
w	wiliam

Limitations: 
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The diphone matrix includes a large number of rare diphones that occur only in foreign words.  Their appearance in Hebrew discourse is limited, yet we assumed that their inclusion would allow us to work freely with texts of journalistic nature or those pertaining to everyday speech, in which the use of such words is quite common.  The database does not account for the "Sephardic" pronunciation of guggurals, and consonant-w/w-consonant diphones are currently not accounted for. 


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2.0 Installation and Tests
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If  you  have  not copied   the MBROLA software   yet,  please consult
the MBROLA project homepage and get it.

Copy hb2.zip into the mbrola directory and unzip it : 

   unzip hb2.zip (or pkunzip on PC/DOS)


Also refer  to the readme.txt file provided  with  the mbrola software
for using it. 

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3.0 Announcement
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4.0 Acknowledgments
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Thanks to Mike Heidenreich for his help with recording the diphones.

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Esther Raizen
er@uts.cc.utexas.edu
http://www.laits.utexas.edu/hebrew
        
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