The DEMOSTHeNES speech composer

In this paper we present the design and development of a modular and scalable speech composer named DEMOSTHeNES. It has been designed for converting plain or formatted text (e.g. HMTL) to a combination of speech and audio signals. DEMOSTHeNES' architecture constitutes an extension to current Text-to-Speech systems’ structure that enables an open set of module-defined functions to interact with the under processing text at any stage of the text-tospeech conversion. Details on its implementation are given here. Furthermore, we present some techniques for text handling and prosody generation using DEMOSTHeNES.