sridhar wrote:
I'm wondering if there's anything we can do to make TTS sound more
'human'. We'd like to be able to use the XOs to teach English
literacy, but the espeak voices are very robotic.
My understanding is that espeak is optimised for low-power devices
(great for XOs) and clear (if robotic) speech. Would it be feasible to
switch to something else, like festival?
i've run festival as part of my home automation system for many many
years, including the last 3 or so on an XO-1 (debxo) which acts as my
current HA server.
the first secret is to run it in client/server mode, to avoid the
server startup latency on every enunciation. but even after that, i
think the latency will be too high for your application. i just
tested it: given a moderate english sentence, it took 3 seconds to
produce output. (i hide this on my system by caching utterances --
that's more feasible in a menuing system than when teaching literacy.)
http://dev.laptop.org/~pgf/junk/festival_out.wav (5 seconds on XO-1)
flite is a lower cost version of festival that might be appropriate.
it seems to reduce the conversion time to about half a second.
but the quality suffers as well.
http://dev.laptop.org/~pgf/junk/flite_out.wav (.5 seconds on XO-1)
fyi, current festival server process footprint:
root 999 0.0 9.4 26668 20004 ?Ss Jun06 10:03
/usr/bin/festival --server /usr/local/etc/nosil.scm
i haven't used espeak -- i suspect there are API interfaces that are
far richer than what i'm doing from the shell commandline. i don't
know how one might access festival at that level.
paul
This is some food for thought:
http://braille.uwo.ca/pipermail/speakup/2008-July/046755.html
Sridhar
Sridhar Dhanapalan
Technical Manager
One Laptop per Child Australia
M: +61 425 239 701
E: srid...@laptop.org.au
A: G.P.O. Box 731
Sydney, NSW 2001
W: www.laptop.org.au
___
Devel mailing list
Devel@lists.laptop.org
http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
=-
paul fox, p...@laptop.org
___
Devel mailing list
Devel@lists.laptop.org
http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
