Thanks to Rahul Bhalerao , he wrote the Marathi module for dhvani– The Indian Language Text to speech System. Dhvani can speak 10 Indian languages now: Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Panjabi, Tamil, and Telugu.
Rahul also gave some patches for hindi module and for some other bugs. The code is available in CVS.
The automatic language detection algorithm will not work for Marathi since it uses the devanagari script and I have assigned the unicode range used for language detection to Hindi. So it requires a langauge switch like “dhvani -l mr inputfile”
Many new features for dhvani are in development, incluiding pitch and tempo control of the generated speech. And I am trying to improve the code quality too.
I had demonstrated the tamil module at NRCFOSS, AU-KBC centre, chennai a few days back and Amachu offered help for improving the tamil pronunciaton rules.
For those are interested in Marathi module, I have some sample speech files generated by dhvani in ogg format. The text is taken from an article about Marathi langauge in Marathi wikipedia. Here is the article and here is the exact text used for the speech
Dhvani has an IRC channel now: #dhvani at freenode