Re: Emacs and Festival

[David Picón Álvarez <david@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

First sorry about my replies, my mail agent atm isn't adding the quoting
sign for some obscure reason.
From: "Tim Cross" <tcross@xxxxxxxxxxx>
You are correct that festival offers more sophisticated speech
services, but I believe one of the biggest criticisms of festival was
that it was not as responsive/fast as other systems, in particular
flite, which is a light weight version.

That criticism was, and to some extent is, correct. Yet computers become
ever faster and get more RAM, and festival's getting usable about now. At
least for me. So it would be really nice to be able to use it. However, from
the rest of your reply, this won't be possible, or at least not easy.

[snipped material about speechd]

With respect to TTS engines for emacspeak, I think by far the best is
IBM's ViaVoice. Unfortunately, it is difficult to get runtime licenses
for the software. There has been promises of individual runtime
licenses being made available, but as far as I know, this has not yet
occured. Therefore, the only way to easily get a runtime is to buy the
SDK, which is around $300US. I was lucky enough to convince my
employer to purchase it for me and its worked really well.

Could you give me some direction on who is selling the SDK? Just a URL would
do, or if you have more info about pricing etc it would also be welcome but
I can as well check it on the web.

By the way, there's a new(?) free (as in speech) TTS engine called eSpeak
which in my view is quite good in several ways that matter, among which are
responsiveness, speed and clarity at high speed. Maybe one day it will also
be possible to use it with emacspeak.


Thanks for all your help, and I will write some notes on the process.

--David.

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