Re: dtk-soft

[Mario Lang <mlang@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Tim Cross <tcross@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> I was just wondering what others thought of the software dectalk
> synth? My initial feeling is that its OK, but it seems to be a bit
> sluggish. When typing, it doesn't echo characters unless you type very
> slowly. I also find its volume is very low.

Noticed both of those effects here too.

[...]

> I was wondeirng if anyone else had notice the sluggishness - its
> possible I might be able to improve performance with some irq tweaking
> etc. 

I've tried it on a pIII 866, which should really suffice for whatever speech
synthesis needs.  Character-echo is not really usable, since it does speak
chars very "late".

> Apart from that, I think it looks quite promising and cold be a viable
> alternative to viavoice which is no longer being developed for
> Linux. I suspect that very soon more and more people will have trouble
> running viavoice as the libraries become outdated. This is a great
> pity, as I personally find the quality of the voice in outloud very
> good. I don't know why viavoice is able to get such good voice
> synthesis compared to the software dectalk or festival and do it at a
> good speed. It wold be interesting to know, but I guess thats probably
> proprietary knowledge which is guarded very closely. 

ViaVoice uses the Eloquence engine, which is more or less The Product
for accessibility today.  JAWS for instance uses the same engine to
do its software synthesis.  And even my Nokia Communicator 9210 with the
Talx screen reader uses a Eloquence engine.

I have to agree that Viavoice sounds much better and seems to be faster
to me than dectalk software.

> I plan to look more deeply into this stuff and try my hand at creating
> some voices with festvox - apparently there is a bit of an art to it
> and possibly thats the main difference between these software
> synthesizes. 

If you figure out what tools to use, and how to do it without having to
use graphical tools, I'd like to know about that too please.

-- 
CYa,
  Mario

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