Hello, I've been monitoring the archives for a while, but I thought it was time to subscribe to the list.
I would be interested in helping to contribute beta testing to the project, as well as any ideas or experience that might be of benefit. As a computer user who happens to be blind, I have been using speech synthesis since the early 1980s. (These days, I rely more on braille devices, but speech still plays a significant role). Although there are excellent free (as in freedom) screen readers and speech-based user interfaces available for GNU/Linux, such as Emacspeak (http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/), SpeakUp (http://www.linux-speakup.org/) and Orca (http://www.gnome.org/projects/orca/), the quality of free text to speech systems is, in my judgment at least, somewhat inadequate. To be specific about this, I haven't heard any free software that even comes close to competing with the DECTalk synthesizer which is on my desk here. Moreover, the proprietary speech synthesis systems (available as software only rather than hardware) for GNU/Linux all incur licencing fees, and owing to the lack of access to source code, bugs can't be fixed by the developers of screen readers and speech-based user interfaces, or by users with programming skills. A high-quality, free, synthesizer could also be integrated by default into GNU/LInux distributions, and made available in devices that employ free and open-source software, for example mobile telephones (http://eyes-free.googlecode.com/ exemplifies the latter, and currently uses ESpeak as its synthesizer). Is there interest among participants in the GNUSpeech project in its potential to support such applications? If so, the porting of the text to speech server to GNU/Linux would be a necessary prerequisite, but the development environment would also need to be available to enable the implementation of additional languages. I am also interested in whether the possible accessibility applications of the project might help to attract development resources. I don't know any possible sources of funding or developers at present, but I would gladly participate in any such discussions. Since the text to speech system doesn't run under GNU/Linux yet, I haven't been able to test it. However, the paper and sample files at http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~hill/papers/avios95/menu.htm were very useful. My initial impression is that I find GNUSpeech difficult to understand, partly due to the mixture of British phonetics and North American pronunciation that leads, for example, to pronounced "r" and "l" sounds where they occur in American, but not British English. However, I like the rhythm and intonation, which I know from having read the papers are the subject of substantial research. I don't understand speech synthesis sufficiently to know whether the quality of the speech could be easily improved by fine-tuning the dictionaries and databases, making use of the part of speech information, etc. For the accessibility applications mentioned above, there are other requirements that would need to be satisfied, and again I would be pleased to contribute to such discussions in the event that they become relevant to the project. I am also aware that I am by no means alone in desiring a high-quality text to speech system suitable for such applications in a Linux environment, available as free software. _______________________________________________ gnuspeech-contact mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnuspeech-contact
