A type of a speech markup language, based on SGML and XML.
SABLE is an interesting speech markup language because it is already supported by the most well-known open source speech synthesizer, Festival.
It was based on earlier SGML systems called STML and SSML, and is now in process of integrating two other systems, Bell Labs' STML and Sun's JSML. SABLE is currently developed by Edinburgh University, Carnegie Mellon University, Bell Laboratories, British Telecom, AT&T and Sun Microsystems. The latest draft specification was 0.2 from March 1998.
Home page: http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/sable/
Here's an example that appears to work just fine in Festival. It illustrates some of the features of the language: Specific noting of different types of data (SAYAS), pronouncation (PRON), rate and volume changes, and breaks.
It shows what's the prime idea of SABLE: Most of the work is done right by Festival's normal text-to-speech, but SABLEd text corrects numerous cases that are ambiguous. For example, when properly marked up, "1984" is pronounced, depending on the markup, "nineteen eighty-four", or "one thousand nine hundred eighty-four" - instead of always going by only one of these forms - or worse, guessing!
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE SABLE PUBLIC "-//SABLE//DTD SABLE speech mark up//EN"
"Sable.v0_2.dtd"
[]>
<SABLE>
Good afternoon.
This is a <BREAK /> shall we say <BREAK /> simple demonstration of Sable
(<SAYAS MODE="literal">SABLE</SAYAS>), the speech mark-up
language.
This example was made in the early hours of
<SAYAS MODE="date" MODETYPE="mdy">May 14th, 2002</SAYAS>
by
<RATE SPEED="-40%">
<PRON SUB="yuhrr poe lahnk keyn nen">Urpo Lankinen</PRON>
</RATE>,
who noted that English speakers have trouble pronouncing the
name correctly. (The first name is spelled
<SAYAS MODE="literal">Urpo</SAYAS>, the last name is spelled
<SAYAS MODE="literal">Lankinen</SAYAS>. But that is, of course,
<RATE SPEED="+20%">very, very, <EMPH>very</EMPH> much</RATE>
irrelevant. <VOLUME LEVEL="quiet">Not that it would matter.</VOLUME>)
The example was made for the website Everything<BREAK LEVEL="small" />2.
This site can be accessed at
<SAYAS MODE="net" MODETYPE="url">http://www.everything2.com/</SAYAS>.
</SABLE>