rfc on voices tutorial [long]

["T. V. Raman" <raman@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Robert,

This is a good start --- and a great example of what is
discoverable if one does a bit of poking around:-)
Your document shows you've understood pretty much how things
work, here are the salient points that you should draw out toward
the beginning of your document.




0)  Emacspeak defines a number of voice overlays such as
    voice-bolden, and voice-lighten
    that can be applied to a given voice to change what it sounds
    like.

1)  Voice overlays are defined in terms of Aural CSS (ACSS) to
    keep them independent of a specific TTS engine.

2)  For each such overlay there is a corresponding
    <overlay-name>-settings variable that can be customized via
    custom. 

3)  The numbers in voice-bolden-settings as an example:
    family:        nil
    average-pitch: 1
    pitch-range:   6
    stress:        6
    richness:      nil
    punctuation:   nil

Unset values (nil) show up as "unspecified" in the customize
interface.







4)  Do not directly customize voice-bolden and friends, instead
    customize the corresponding voice-bolden-settings, since that
    ensures that all voices that are defined in terms of
    voice-bolden get correctly updated.


5)  Discovering what to customize:
    Command emacspeak-show-personality-at-point 
(bound by default to C-e M-v) will show you the value of
    properties personality and face at point. A recent update I
    implemented last weekend makes this more useful, so make sure
    you do a CVS update;
    earlier  this command used to display the ACSS setting ---
    now it displays the abstract name. Describe-variable on these
    names should tell you what to customize; so as an example:

    Put point on a comment line, and hit C-e M-v:
    you will hear 

    <quote>
    Personality emacspeak-voice-lock-comment-personality Face
    font-lock-comment-delimiter-face  
</quote>

Describe-variable of emacspeak-voice-lock-comment-personality
gives:

<quote>
emacspeak-voice-lock-comment-personality's value is acss-p0-s0-all

Documentation:
Personality used for font-lock-comment-face
This personality uses  voice-monotone whose  effect can be changed globally by customizing voice-monotone-settings.

</quote>

I'll answer your question about changing the overall voice in a
separate message.
Notice however that since the system is designed to apply changes
as overlays to a given voice,  changing the default voice family
will *change* everything, 
which on today's TTS engines wont sound very good. The dirty
secret among all TTS engines is that the default male voice is
the one that is best tuned, and when engines like the Dectalk or
ViaVoice say they have N voices, usually those N voices are just
tweaks to the default voice.

--Raman 

-- 
Best Regards,
--raman

      
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