Re: process speaker not running

[Alvin Smith <email@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hmmm.  It is very difficult to understand what is being read now than
when I had ViaVoice working...  I would like to use all free software. 
I am just starting to put together a project that uses emacspeak,
(www.audioppix.com) and now I see that it seems that we have gone
backwards as far as speech synthesizers go.  

What have you found that needs to be done to improve the quality of
flite?   

Festival sounds better.  I can get output using the "SayText" command,
but he sounds German :-).

I would like to use the festival synth instead of the flite synth.  Is
there also a script for that?

I appreciate all of your help.

Thanks!


On Mon, 2003-08-18 at 05:35, Tim Cross wrote:
> 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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-- 
Alvin Smith <email@xxxxxxxxxxx>

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