Re: Emacs and Festival

[Tim Cross <tcross@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

From: Jason White <jasonw@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: Emacs and Festival
Date: Sun, 31 Dec 2006 16:06:56 +1100

> On Sun, Dec 31, 2006 at 01:00:34PM +1100, Tim Cross wrote:
> > My second choice for a speech server would be the software dectalk
> > from fonix. This one only costs about $90US. However, it does have
> > some stability problems. I found it regularly died and I'd have to
> > keep restarting it with C-e C-s. 
> 
> Version 4.64 is reputed to be better. However, the purchasing process on the
> Web site required Javascript, so I didn't proceed with it. Also, I'm waiting
> for an x86_64 version so I won't have to install 32-bit versions of tcl and
> the necessary libraries on my laptop, which was recently "upgraded" from
> Gentoo to Debian AMD64.
> 
> Software DECTALK 4.61 crashed frequently and some non-expert had evidently
> modified the speech parameters in ways that reduced rather than increased the
> quality as compared with the DECTALK Express. This, too, was reportedly fixed
> after Fonix acquired the software.
> 

The version I was running (about 2 years old now) was version 5.00. It
did seem to be more stable than 4.61. 

I believe the instability was related to the dectalk "in-line"
commands. When I modified the dtk-soft script and removed some of
these, things did seem to be more stable. Also, I found that using it
with speech dispatcher, there were no instability issues and it would
rarely crash. This seemed to support my hypothesis as the use with
speech dispatcher is/was very basic and did not use the in-line
commands. I also found it was very stable when using the command line
tool and I could reliably get it to speak large volumes of text
without a problem. 

Tim

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