Dear Fellow Debian TTS gourp members, Debian a11y group members, Recently Czech voices for festival have been offered for adoption.
As a founding member of the Debian TTS (text to speech) group which maintains festival and speech tools it suggests to me that the natural place to maintain Czech festival voices is within the TTS group. The advantages I can see is that: 1) Problems with voices are likely to be dependent on the changes in new versions of festival as voices evolve quite slowly in general. 2) TTS group have experience with the festival/speech-tools codebase and thus have a bit of experience with how festvox voices in the general sense are created and how they function in the Festival/Speech-tools framework. The major disadvantage is that: 1) Currently the TTS team has no Czech speaker. Although the team is fortunate to have speakers of a number of different languages. The question becomes how can Debian provide Czech voices for its community. In the absence of a Czech speaker rapidly offering to take on the Czech festival voices I make the following proposal. Although I am not a Czech speaker, I care enough particularly about fellow Czech Debian community to ask to bring Czech voices within the TTS group and work on it for the Debian community. I would be happy to integrate the voices into TTS groups alioth facilities, monitors bugs lists, test the voices with changes to festival/speech-tools. I suspect that any problems with voices are likely to be all or nothing. It works or its substantially broken. Subtle problems might be detectable by people familiar with the broad language family, a Rosetta Stone (more on this later) and sufficient motivation and a desire to work with bug filers to fix the problems. The Czech lanaguage is partially intelligible to me (I am familiar with another Eastern European language). So what is this Rosetta stone I am suggesting? In order for festival team members to look after the voices a set of reference encodings would be generated for the team which would be kept in their repository for testing purposes. They would be moderate sized reference texts in the language and the equivalent sound files rendered by festival voices. This would guard against a fairly large range of faults in TTS generation which would be obvious to a motivated non-speaker. The more subtle faults could be checked with bug filers and by a more rare reaching out to the Czech Debian community for listening tests. This effectively separates the need and interest in understanding how voices are created and maintained from the ability to native speak the language which would only require us to find occasional listeners or have them show interest through bug filling. My proposal intends to use the limited resources of the Debian community by separating interest in speech generation and technical aspects with a outreaching to native listeners who may not be interested in developing interest in the technical aspects of voice maintainence. I ask for comments from fellow TTS members, a11y team members and the current maintainers for on whether this is likely to be a workable scheme. I also specifically ask if the retiring Czech voice maintainers would be interested in a short collaboration of creating 10-20 minutes of sound files from representative texts of Czech to act as a Rosetta Stone for verifying the voices during maintainence and to be included in our git repository. Opinions Please? best regards, Peter Drysdale
