> On 13 Jul, Hynek Hanke <hanke at brailcom.org> wrote >> It would be great if somebody who thinks that Festival >> is actually worse than eSpeak in quality of speech >> could try to elaborate more about the reasons. >> Hello all, thank you for all your feedback. Now it is much more clear to me why many users prefer this or that TTS system which I would think is not as natural as the other ones. This is a valuable input for the future developement of Speech Dispatcher. One of the outputs is an idea that we could offer in Speech Dispatcher a capability to run-time switch between synthesizers like espeak and festival based on the nature of the text being read and the speed of pronounciation. So if the user switched on this capability, for example, espeak would be used for high speed reading and ordinary work while a synthesizer like festival with potentially more natural sounding voices could be used for reading of long texts, books and in other occasions where natural speech is prefered. Of course this would have to be configurable. Now in Speech Dispatcher 0.6.7 which was released this week and will soon be available in the distributions, there is another possibility on the side of TTS systems trying to sound naturally, which is espeak with MBROLA voices. It is free but not Free Software, so it contains significant limitations, although on the other side, it offers quite a broad set of voices. This can be used with the new espeak-mbrola-generic output module. With regards, Hynek Hanke
