Emacspeak+freetts

[Tim Cross <tcross@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Others may disagree, but here is my view on the benefits of queuing
speech segments prior to having them spoken. 

Many TTS engines are able to provide improved speech based on the
context of the word. For example, providing slightly different
inflection or a longer pause at the end of a sentence. Having more
text in larger chunks increases the likelihood of being able to do
this. 

There is also an efficiency aspect. To some extent, there is a certain
amount of overhead which occurs regardless of whether your
synthasising one word or a whole sentence. You could think of this as
a fixed cost of synthesis. With larger chungs of text, you are
spreading this cost over more words, in effect reducing the cost per
word. Another advantage of synthesising larger blocks is that it can
provide smoother speech. In most cases, there will be some lag between
sending the speech to be synthesised and getting the resulting sound.
If you do the synthesis one word at a time, you can get a slightly
jerky sound because of extended delays between words occuring as the
TTS does its thing. If you pass, for example, whole sentences to be
processed at once, you don't get additional delays between the words
and the overall speech sounds smoother and possibly more natural.


Tim

Deepak Thomas writes:
 >  I was trying to enhance the funtionality of the speech server provided
 > with the FreeTTS packageas as it  does not implement all the functionality
 > of the protocol specified at
 > http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/info/html/TTS-Servers.html
 > 
 > The main thing is that it handles the tts_say and the q text identically.
 > I.e ,when the speech server recevies the q text commands,it starts playback
 > immediately.
 > It does not queue the text in any way.Also the d command is ignored ,it is
 > not handled by the speech server. It would be really helpful if someone
 > could shed some light about why some text strings are to be queued. And also
 > the repurcursions of handling both the tts_say and the q command
 > identically.
 > 
 > Thank you,
 > Deepak
 > &nbsp;I was trying to enhance the funtionality of the speech server provided <br>with the FreeTTS packageas as it&nbsp; does not implement all the functionality of the protocol specified at<br><a href="http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/info/html/TTS-Servers.html" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">
 > http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/info/html/TTS-Servers.html</a><br><br>The main thing is that it handles the tts_say and the q text identically. I.e ,when the speech server recevies the q text commands,it starts playback immediately.
 > <br>It does not queue the text in any way.Also the d command is ignored ,it is not handled by the speech server. It would be really helpful if someone could shed some light about why some text strings are to be queued. And also the repurcursions of handling both the tts_say and the q command identically.
 > <br><br>Thank you,<br>Deepak  

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