I know some one who could probably make the recordings for other voices, but you never know. Thanks Nick ----- Original Message ----- From: "Hynek Hanke" <hanke@xxxxxxxx> To: "Speakup is a screen review system for Linux." <speakup at braille.uwo.ca> Sent: Friday, July 02, 2004 5:48 PM Subject: Re: What should Festival do better? (was: Speech Dispatcher 0.5Release Candidate 1 available) > On Fri, Jul 02, 2004 at 04:01:48PM -0400, Jacob Schmude wrote: > > 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. > > If Festival is doing this on your machine, something is *really* > wrong. I do agree that the responsiveness is still worse than in > hardware synthesis or in Flite when you are scrolling fast through > lines or doing something similar. But the delays I'm tuning here right > now are in the order of tens of miliseconds and I have a 1.5GHz machine. > > (Also, the keys and characters get cached in the Festival output module > if you use Festival through Speech Dispatcher, so they don't even have > to be synthesized most of the time and typing input or moving a cursor > should be quite fast.) > > I don't know what might cause such big delays on your machine, but it's > definitely not a standard behavior of Festival and Speech Dispatcher. > Could you please send me a Festival output module debug log after > you install 0.5rc1? > > Still, even on my machine, much of the delays in communication with > Festival are caused by issues in socket communication and similar, not > by a lack of performance of my computer, so I think this can be fixed. > However, if I downscale to 500MHz, a lack of performance becomes visible. > > > 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. > > I don't know about FreeTTS, but I've heard that importing Festival > voices into Flite is not a trivial job :( But I agree with you that we > need more (especially more languages!) and higher quality voices for > Festival. The question is who will work on it, since it requires quite > a lot of time to create a new voice. On the other side, Festival is > very flexible in this regard. It uses an extension lisp-like language > and many interesting things can be done this way without the need to > modify C code in the core of Festival. > > With Regards & thanks everyone for an interesting discussion so far, > Hynek > > _______________________________________________ > Speakup mailing list > Speakup at braille.uwo.ca > http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
