Re: process speaker not running

[Janina Sajka <janina@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Two quick comments on this thread ...

1.	There is an interface for emacspeak (of sorts) in FreeTTS, and
it's documented in the files you get when you download the tar ball. You
do have to dig a bit to find everything, though.

2.	There is work going on in building new voices which is a welcome
development. Some of it is GPL, some of it commercial/proprietary. The
same people who did Flite also have commercial voices for $30 U.S. which
are quite good and would probably work with emacspeak well. Because
Gnopernicus is interested in these voices, headers will be made
available in the next release of Cepstral voices. See www.cepstral.com.

Tim Cross writes:
> From: Tim Cross <tcross@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> 
> >>>>> "Alvin" == Alvin Smith <email@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> 
>  Alvin> Hmmm.  It is very difficult to understand what is being read
>  Alvin> now than when I had ViaVoice working...  I would like to use
>  Alvin> all free software.  I am just starting to put together a
>  Alvin> project that uses emacspeak, (www.audioppix.com) and now I see
>  Alvin> that it seems that we have gone backwards as far as speech
>  Alvin> synthesizers go.
> 
> The technology used by festival/flite is different to that used by
> ViaVoice, but I get the feeling the general consensus is that the
> festival/flite technology offers the promise of more human like voices
> than ViaVoice. From what I've been told, creating new voices for
> festival is a bit of an art form and this will probably improve as
> people get to understand it better. The up side is that you do get use
> to the difference and should soon be able to understand festival/flite
> voices as easily as the ViaVoice ones. 
> 
>  Alvin> What have you found that needs to be done to improve the
>  Alvin> quality of flite?
> 
> The poorer quality of flite voices is due to it using 8k samples,
> rather than 16k which festival can use. If flite is modified to use
> 16k voices, its quality will be as good. I beleive I read somewhere
> that there were people working on this. 
> 
>  Alvin> Festival sounds better.  I can get output using the "SayText"
>  Alvin> command, but he sounds German :-).
> 
> Thats od - I don't get a german sound to the voices at all. Which
> voices are you using for festival?
> 
>  Alvin> I would like to use the festival synth instead of the flite
>  Alvin> synth.  Is there also a script for that?
> 
> There are two interface versions to festival I know of. One uses a
> perl script and can be found at http://espeakf.sourceforge.net and the
> other works by modifying emacspeak itself, but I have not tried it
> yet. See http://www.pollock-nageoire.net/festival/ for details. 
> 
> There is also a java based speech synthesizer called freeTTS, which
> does not really have an interface to emacspeak, but it probably
> wouldn't be difficult to implement. I have not tried this synthesizer
> either and have no idea about its quality. I think the project is also
> hosted by sourceforge. 
> 
> Tim
> 
> 
>  Alvin> I appreciate all of your help.
> 
>  Alvin> Thanks!
> 
> 
>  Alvin> 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>
>  >>
>  Alvin> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
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>  >> 
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>  Alvin> -- Alvin Smith <email@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> 
>  Alvin> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
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> 
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-- 
	
				Janina Sajka, Director
				Technology Research and Development
				Governmental Relations Group
				American Foundation for the Blind (AFB)

Email: janina@xxxxxxxxxxx		Phone: (202) 408-8175

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