Mind-tuning: Using gnuspeech now for a new language?
I just discovered gnuspeech and am reading the available documentation. I have a medium- to long-term goal of creating a text-to-speech system for the Hopi language. I had assumed that I would create a diphone or unit- selection voice using a framework like Festival/Festvox, but now I'm wondering if it might be possible or even desirable to use gnuspeech in some way. One problem in the audio recording of Hopi subjects (to build a database for a diphone or unit-selection voice) would be that few of them are acquainted with the orthography. One possibility would be to present the prompts as audio, perhaps generated by a program like gnuspeech. Of course, a gnuspeech voice for Hopi could be very interesting by itself. My background: computational linguist, some background in phonetics/phonology/IPA, specialist in finite-state morphological analysis and generation. Competence in Unicode, orthographies, input methods, XML. Programming in Perl, Python, Java, C. Using Mac Tibook running OS X 10.3.9. But I'm just getting into text-to-speech as a private interest. Hopi Language Background: 1. There is a de facto standard or first-priority dialect now, "Third Mesa Hopi", as documented in the excellent "Hopi Dictionary/Hop�ikwa Lav�ytutuveni", 1997. 2. The phonology and orthography are well defined. I can map reliably from orthographical text to phoneme strings, including word stress and a falling-tone phonomenon, using a Python script; no auxiliary pronunciation dictionary is required. 3. Phonetic details including allophonic variants, vowel lengths, and the realization of the falling-tone phonomenon are still to be investigated. Rhythm and intonation still need to be investigated. Big Question: Is the gnuspeech project currently at a state where I could reasonably use it to create a text-to-speech system for Hopi? Or should I concentrate on Festival/Festvox? Thanks, Ken _______________________________________________ gnuspeech-contact mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnuspeech-contact
