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The Edinburgh Speech Tools Library is library of general speech software, written at the Centre for Speech Technology Research at the University of Edinburgh.
The Edinburgh Speech Tools Library is written is C++ and provide a range of for common tasks found in speech processing. The library provides a set of stand alone executable programs and a set of library calls which can be linked into user programs.
Updates and news about the speech tools include releases and bug fixes may be found at
Most speech researchers spend a considerable amount of time writing, developing and debugging code. In fact, many researchers spend most of their time doing this. The sad fact is that most of this time is spent on unnecessary tasks - time which could be better spent doing "real" research. The library is intended to provide software that programmers use day-to-day, and provide this in an easy to use fashion.
The Edinburgh Speech Tools Library has two main parts: a software library and a set of programs which use the library.
A library is a single central place where useful software is kept. A UNIX library is a single file (in this case called libestools.a) which can be linked to an individual program. When writing a program, you can call any of the functions in the library, and they will automatically be linked into your program when you compile. The key point is that you never need look at the library itself or copy the code in it. That way you can write small programs, concentrate on the algorithms and not have to worry about any infrastructure issues.
The speech tools also provide a number of utility programs for things like playback, sampling rate conversion file format conversion etc. Usually these programs are just wrap-around executables based on standard speech tools library functions.
Once installed, speech tools can be used either by running the exectuable programs or by building your own C++ programs and linking to the library.
Documentation on executable programs is found in .
Instructions on how to build your own programs which use the library are found in .