In article <20060512204050.75077.qmail at web38611.mail.mud.yahoo.com>, Arthur Pirika <arfy8820 at yahoo.com.au> wrote: > Well, thanks to those who helped out here -- working > perfectly now! I'd be interested if slackware's the > only distro affected by this, or do others have to add > -lphread to the make file? Gentoo/fedora/debian users? eSpeak doesn't use pthread so it shouldn't need to link to it. It seems that the portaudio sound interface does use it, but I don't see why that should affect the compilation of eSpeak, unless you are not using portaudio as a shared library, but are instead combining it into the eSpeak binary as a static library. Perhaps that's the difference. I use a Debian based system. The "libportaudio0" package contains the portaudio shared library. It has a dependency on the "libc6" package, which is the standard GNU Shared C Library, which includes pthread as one of its components. > Also, now that eSpeaks going through it's paces, I'm curious as to > where the samples, phonem data etc came from? >From my mouth :-) Unvoiced consonants (eg. [t] [s] [f]) are simply recorded sound samples. The vowels and sonorant consonants (eg. [n] [w] [l]) are generated at run-time from formant details (peaks in the frequency spectrum). Voiced consonants (eg. [d] [z] [v]) are a combination of both these methods. There is some information at http://espeak.sourceforge.net/docindex.html > Would it be possible to either implement an american english voice > using the existing data or create one in the future? Just some > thoughts. Yes, but I don't speak American so I'll leave that to someone else. You'd need to make some adjustments to the vowels and the relative lengths of phonemes and syllables, but a bigger problem (given the complexity of English pronunciation rules and exceptions) would be the different spelling to phoneme translation. eg: British American cart [kA:t] [kA:rt] here [hI@] [hIr] or perhaps [hI at r] city [sItI] [sI*i] (where [*] is a sort of degenerate [d] sound) The [*] phoneme is not currently present in eSpeak, and post-vocalic [r] (i.e. not following a vowel) needs some work. Adjusting vowels and adding new phonemes will need my vowel-editing and phoneme data compilation program, which I haven't released yet. It needs some tidying up, and more significantly, instructions on how to use it! But if anyone is seriously interested, let me know.
