For me it has to do with clarity and intonation. I have used some 16 bit voices of festival. Of these kind of voices, the commercial ones generally are better. The Cepstral voices are already sounding better than the standard festival voices while the realspeak voices (not affordable under Linux) are quite good. I do find the espeak/Mbrola combination to be a good compromise between natural speech, responsiveness and usable intonation. One might want to use both the natural type voice and some thing like the synthesized espeak voice depending on what is being read. I find that users of speech synthesizers tend to listen for different qualities in a voice than the casual person who would just need to here the occasional sentence or two. Regards, Willem On Mon, 14 Jul 2008, John Heim wrote: > > ----- Original Message ----- > 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. > > > > For me it was entirely about response time. Festival was just too slow. Key > echo was impossible. Espeak worked really well in that regard. > > > _______________________________________________ > Speakup mailing list > Speakup at braille.uwo.ca > http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup > > -- This message is subject to the CSIR's copyright terms and conditions, e-mail legal notice, and implemented Open Document Format (ODF) standard. The full disclaimer details can be found at http://www.csir.co.za/disclaimer.html. This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean. MailScanner thanks Transtec Computers for their support.
