Praat is a free

Free software

Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...

 scientific software

Computer software

Computer software, or just software, is a collection of computer programs and related data that provide the instructions for telling a computer what to do and how to do it....

 program for the analysis

Voice analysis

Voice analysis is the study of speech sounds for purposes other than linguistic content, such as in speech recognition. Such studies include mostly medical analysis of the voice i.e. phoniatrics, but also speaker identification...

 of speech in phonetics

Phonetics

Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that comprises the study of the sounds of human speech, or—in the case of sign languages—the equivalent aspects of sign. It is concerned with the physical properties of speech sounds or signs : their physiological production, acoustic properties, auditory...

. It has been designed and continuously developed by Paul Boersma

Paul Boersma

Paul Boersma is Professor of Phonetic Sciences at the University of Amsterdam. His research and teaching focus on the relationship between phonology and phonetics. Prof. dr. Boersma is mainly known for designing the worldwide used speech signal processing program Praat .-External links:* *...

 and David Weenink of the University of Amsterdam. It can run on a wide range of operating system

Operating system

An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...

s, including various Unix

Unix

Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...

 versions, Mac

Mac OS

Mac OS is a series of graphical user interface-based operating systems developed by Apple Inc. for their Macintosh line of computer systems. The Macintosh user experience is credited with popularizing the graphical user interface...

 and Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

 (95, 98, NT4, ME, 2000, XP, Vista). The program also supports speech synthesis

Speech synthesis

Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware...

, including articulatory synthesis

Articulatory synthesis

Articulatory synthesis refers to computational techniques for synthesizing speech based on models of the human vocal tract and the articulation processes occurring there. The shape of the vocal tract can be controlled in a number of ways which usually involves modifying the position of the speech...

.

Version history

Version	Date	Main
3.1	December 5, 1995
4.0	October 15, 2001
4.1	June 5, 2003	MacOS X edition, More than 99 percent of the source code distributed under the General Public Licence.
5.0	December 10, 2007
5.1	January 31, 2009

External links

• Praat: doing Phonetics by Computer — Official site