Steve Holmes wrote: > Yeah but Espeak is much smaller and frankly better than festival. > Hello Steve and others, me personally and some other people here can't really understand how can someone consider the espeak voices be of better quality than the festival voices. To me it seems the difference in quality is just about incomparable. At least, it seems to be a matter of user preference. But given the difference is really quite big, I think it might be something more as well. Perhaps the ones who tested Festival didn't test the better quality voices or their setup just included 8-bit voices or perhaps there was some other problem. This would be a no surprise because given that Festival is a more complex solution and flexible solution, it is necessarily a bit harder to setup and there are more things that one can get wrong. Another think that might be in play here is that I expect that many blind users are used to the simple hardware synthesizers, from which many used to offer quite an artificial speech. Perhaps these users got used to this sound so much that they now actually consider a more natural synthesized voice as of lower quality? 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. We might then try to discover if these reasons are real or if they are of user preference or if it is even possible to fix them with a slight fix in the configuration. I think such an effort would be very useful. To discover the possible traps as well as to get more light on this discussion which, I admit, seems always very strange to me. All help appreciated. Now do not get me wrong that I think eSpeak is a bad program, because that is totally not the case. eSpeak offers (in my opinion) a lower speech quality as a trade-off for very high speed, small size, disponibility with voices for a great amount of languages and easy installation/very little configuration necessary. The level of support for accessibility is very good in both of them (Festival through festival-freebsoft-utils, espeak natively). This is why eSpeak is the current default in Speech Dispatcher because it is initially easier to get running and it covers a great span of languages. The documentation however strongly suggest users whose language is supported by Festival to try it as their primary syntesizer for a better voice quality. With regards, Hynek Hanke
