process speaker not running

[Tim Cross <tcross@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

IBM's ViaVoice is all but dead for the linux community. They are no
longer supporting it and recent changes in some of the libraries it
uses cause it to seg fault. Therefore, you are unlikely to get it to
work on later versions of Linux. 

However, its not all doom and gloom. There are alternatives which,
while not as easy and as high quality as ViaVoice, do work. In the
last 3 days, I've got emacspeak 18 working with both eflite and
festival. I'm also running the software dectalk, which only costs
$50US. 

One important tip to getting this stuff working....

   Make sure you can generate speech with both festival and flite
   prior to trying to get it working with emacspeak. This will
   eliminate one source of potential problems and give you an idea of
   where to look. Don't bother trying to get emacspeak working until
   you know your synthesizer is working first. 


The software dectalk is probably the closest in features to ViaVoice
and sounds very much like the hardware dectalk. My only real complaint
with it is its responsiveness. I cannot get it to work with character
echo unless I type very slowly. It also produces a much lower volume
than anything else on the system. This means if you want to use audio
icons, you have to manipulate them so that they are at half volume
when played. Other sound sources may mean you have to adjust your
volume a bit e.g. if I play an MP3, I must turn down the volume to
avoid waking the neighbours. 

The eflite solution seems quite robust and workable, but it lacks the
multi-voice capabilities, which I like very much. I've not used it
much, but it seems quite robust. 

There are at least two festival interfaces I know of. One uses a perl
script to interface with festival. It has some support for multiple
voices, but does seem to lack some responsiveness and sounds a bit
"choppy" if you have lots of voice changes in a row. I hope to look at
this and see if there is any way of improving performance. The other
festival interface requires patching to emacspeak itself. It looks
quite interesting, but I have not tried it yet. There is also a driver
for MBROLA, but I have not tried it either.

Tim

>>>>> "Alvin" == Alvin Smith <email@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

 Alvin> I have tried everything I could think of and everything I
 Alvin> could find in documents on the internet to solve this issue.

 Alvin> I just installed flite, eflite, et al and still no joy.

 Alvin> I have festival installed, IBM TTS installed, and nothing
 Alvin> seems to faze emacspeak.

 Alvin> I am sure it was working under redhat 7.3, but now under
 Alvin> redhat 9.0 I cannot get it to work at all.

 Alvin> Any help would be appreciated!

 Alvin> Thanks, -- Alvin Smith <email@xxxxxxxxxxx>

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