Justin Ekis p??e v Po 05. 06. 2006 v 18:52 -0400: > You mentioned wanting more noticeable inflection. Have you tried any of > the other software speech options, and would you say the inflection is > better than some of them? Is it not as good as eloquence? That's the top > thing that sets eloquence above all software speech I've tried on linux > and I'd be disappointed if that wasn't the case here. Hi Justin and others, I'm interested if you or others tried Festival. Do you know it is possible to adjust the inflection span with (set-pitch-range value) in /etc/festival.conf (will soon be adjustable through Speech Dispatcher too)? Bellow is included a description of how to test it easily. Also I want to be sure nobody mistakes Festival voices with Flite voices. Even though they have the same name for using the same bases for their diphone databases, they are not the same voices at all. If you are still not satisfied with the inflection, could you please provide feedback on what is wrong with it (if possible, including the voice name) ? This is VERY important, because Festival is currently the most advanced Free Software synthesis tool to my knowledge. Most parts of the synthesis process, the databases etc. are not fixed by the author, but they are written as modules in Lisp and they can be fixed/rewritten as well as new modules can be added by third sides. Everything is configurable. So if people are interested in Free Software and the principles behind GNU, Linux and its technical features, the right way now to get a better synthesizer is to support Festival by providing a list of requested features and bug-fixes. (Another way would be to create a whole new framework for software synthesis, similar to Festival, but that would be a big project compared to this.) I do not claim I currently know anyone who has time and resources to work on it, but if a wish-list is created, someone might be found. Thank you, Hynek Hanke How to test inflection with Festival ==================================== A way to test it is to run the festival binary $ festival and type in > (SayText "This is the default inflection") > (set-pitch-range 200) > (SayText "Hello, how are you? I'm fine, what is new? Inflection is bigger!") Once you are at it, you can also test the available voices. You get the list of available voices by > (voice-list) and then you can switch them by issuing a command composed by the string "(voice_", the name of the voice and the closing parenthesis. > (voice_kal_diphone) > (SayText "something") or > (voice_ked_diphone) > (SayText "something") and so on. For more commands, see Festival documentation. Maybe there are more settings that can influence inflection in a significant way, I'm CCing a Festival developer from Brailcom who can maybe say more about them.
