I use Keven, and it takes about a half of a second to respond. Also, I can't get it to shut the hell up! However, the voice does sound decent, It's decently human, it just has too many pawses, and should respond that much faster. Thanks, Nick ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jacob Schmude" <jschmude@xxxxxxxxxxxx> To: "Speakup is a screen review system for Linux." <speakup at braille.uwo.ca> Sent: Friday, July 02, 2004 4:01 PM Subject: Re: What should Festival do better? (was: Speech Dispatcher 0.5 Release Candidate 1 available) > Hi > I must agree with Greg on this one. It's a little better if you > use the kal16 voice, but it's still nowhere near anything like dec or > eloquence, or even the SSI-263 based synths like the artic or bns. > However, the big issue for me is responsiveness. This, to put it frankly, > festival is not. It shuts up just fine, but it takes at least a second to > begin speaking. This is a 2.13ghz athlon I'm talking about, and it takes a > second to speak a short line. If this line happens to be of a long length > (such as an email message listing) festival takes 3 seconds or more to > start speaking. This, in my mind, is simply unacceptable. I haven't had a > chance to grab 0.5rc1 yet, maybe this responsiveness has been improved. > After responsiveness gets fixed, what we need for festival is a > high-quality voice set. Come to think of it, flite and FreeTTS could use > this as well. At the moment festival's voice has no inflection to speak > of, only has pauses for punctuations, and frankly gives me a headache if I > listen to it for too long. If these issues were fixed I believe festival > would be a viable option. There's no way I'm going to go buy Cepstral, as > the $30 per voice policy doesn't sit well with me, I consider that a > rip-off, I don't care how good the voice sounds. I'll be sticking with > dectalk 5 for now, but if festival had a better voice and better > responsiveness, I'd most definitely use it. And, of course, all flames > will be directed to /dev/null. > > On Fri, 2 Jul 2004, Gregory Nowak wrote: > > GN> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > GN> Hash: SHA1 > GN> > GN> Well, frankly, festival sounds like garbage, worst then the Braille 'n > GN> Speak or accent in my opinion. When I was using it with gnopernicus, I > GN> found myself spending more time on understanding what festival was > GN> saying, then I did on actually using gnopernicus and using gnome. Yes, > GN> I know, festival is GPL software, and we should be happy that we have > GN> a GPL software synth at all, but Hynek did ask for comments, so I'm > GN> posting my own in an attempt to answer his question of what is wrong > GN> with festival in my opinion, and not in an attempt to start a flame > GN> war (smile). > > _______________________________________________ > Speakup mailing list > Speakup at braille.uwo.ca > http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
