On Tue, Jun 21, 2011 at 9:10 AM, James Simmons <nices...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I've had some experience with TTS from developing Read Etexts. > Originally, I used speech-dispatcher, which provided a way of writing > apps that used TTS without knowing what TTS engine was being used > underneath. There were a couple of problems with that. Since more > than one engine was supported, the RPM for speech-dispatcher needed to > have them all installed. Second, you needed to configure it. > > Aleksey Lim came up with a gstreamer plugin for espeak that needed no > configuration, and that's what we've been using ever since. > > One problem we have with TTS is doing highlighting. An XO laptop is > not fast enough to make the highlighted word keep up with the word > being spoken. (The gstreamer plugin does callbacks just before it > speaks a word, and these callbacks are used to highlight the words). > A slightly faster computer is enough to resolve the problem. If > Festival needed more horsepower to run than espeak it would make a bad > situation worse. > > Also, listening to festival outputs by Paul, I don't notice a real improvement on the robotic voice feeling. James Simmons > > > On Tue, Jun 21, 2011 at 8:43 AM, Paul Fox <p...@laptop.org> wrote: > > 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 > > > de...@lists.laptop.org > > > http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel > > > > =--------------------- > > paul fox, p...@laptop.org > > _______________________________________________ > > IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) > > i...@lists.sugarlabs.org > > http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep > > > _______________________________________________ > Sugar-devel mailing list > Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org > http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel >
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