Sable

Sable is a set of markup codes and symbols that describes spoken text in text-to-speech ( TTS ) applications for voice-enabled Web browsers and voice enabled e-mail . Sable is based on Extensible Markup Language ( XML ) and Standard Generalized Markup Language ( SGML ). Sable combines and replaces two earlier speech synthesis languages: Spoken Text Markup Language ( STML ) and Java Synthesis Markup Language ( JSML ). Sable provides text description tags that describe the structure of the document and speaker directive tags that control the emphasis, pitch, rate, and pronunciation of text.

Sable was developed by a group of representatives from Edinburgh University, Bell Laboratories, British Telecom, AT&T, and Sun Microsystems. The group's goal was to provide a single standard of tags for speech synthesis markup unlike the varying proprietary tag sets used by different speech synthesizers. Sable is designed to improve the quality and appropriateness of speech output, to ensure interoperability with different languages, applications, and platforms, and to support new features in future releases. Implementations of Sable are available in Bell Labs and Festival speech synthesizers.