Re: espeakf?

[Mario Lang <mlang@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thomas Ward <slingshooter@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> Hello, list.
> I finally got around to wanting to try espeakf, the festival server for 
> emacspeak, but I can't seam to check it out of cvs. Everytime I try 
> sourceforge comes back and tells me I am not authorized to checkout the 
> files.
I, as original author of that piece of code, officially
depreached it some months ago.  I asked sourceforge
to remove the project, which they didn't really do yet.
Maybe they just broke the CVS?

> So I have the following questions.
>
> 1. Is espeakf vary good?
no

> 2. If it is worth the time to checkout how do I check it out of cvs, or 
> can someone just send me files?
no, its not worth the hassle.  Use eflite.

> 3. If aquestions 1 and 2 are negative do you think it would be better fro 
> me to write my own emacspeak server for festival?
If you want to do it, sure :) I gave up, because
various problems came up:
1. Festival is slow, very slow.
2. At the time I wrote espeakf, it was not
really easy to get it to change voices inline.  I looked
at SABLE, but all that stuff was far too unstable
to be useful.  I finally just gave up.

I believe the best way to implement a nicely functional festival
server would be to use the scheme level of festival.
i.e., feed it with scheme commands to synth text, and change
voices.  But I was far too unexperienced with scheme
back then, and, unfortunately SIOD (the festival scheme interpreter)
does not support read/write from streams.  So you cant
write it all in scheme, you have to write a emacspeak
server in some language, which then calls festival...

Another approach would have been using the festival C++
API, but AFAIR, it did not allow anything more than
just speak_text...

If you manage to do it, maybe its useful after all, since
todays machines are a lot faster than 3 years ago.  But I'm still
not sure if it is worth the effort.

-- 
CYa,
  Mario | Debian Developer <URL:http://debian.org/>
        | Get my public key via finger mlang@xxxxxxxxxxx
        | 1024D/7FC1A0854909BCCDBE6C102DDFFC022A6B113E44

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