RE: 16k voices

["Sina Bahram" <sbahram@nc.rr.com>]

Thanks Janina, I'll go take a look at them. Have you had any luck with
them, and which ones would you personally recommend?

Thanks again,
Sina

-----Original Message-----
From: speakup-admin@braille.uwo.ca [mailto:speakup-admin@braille.uwo.ca]
On Behalf Of Janina Sajka
Sent: Thursday, September 18, 2003 11:06 AM
To: speakup@braille.uwo.ca
Subject: Re: 16k voices


Right on, Jacob.

But, there is another software synth that's worth the money, and it's
less money than software DEC Talk. Go check out the Linux voices
available at http://www.cepstral.com. Cepstral are the commercial side
of Festival and Flite, by the way.


Jacob Schmude writes:
> From: "Jacob Schmude" <jschmude@adelphia.net>
> 
> Hi
> Honestly, I'd recommend a hardware solution at this point. There are 
> 16k voices out there for festival, flite and freetts. However, that
doesn't necessarily
> have anything at all to do with the quality of the voice. Festival,
flite, and freetts (software synthesizers) all use the same basic
voices. These voices are, in 
> my opinion, terrible. Oh, they're clear due to there being 16K, but
their inflection is almost nonexistant and, due to the pronunciation
they use, they tend to be 
> difficult to understand. You can get the software synths and voices
at:
> festival: http://www.festvox.org/
> flite (festival lite): http://cmuflite.org
> freetts (java-based speech engine) http://freetts.sf.net/
> As of right now, festival is the only software synthesizer supposedly
supported by speakup 1.5. I say supposedly because I've never gotten it
working 
> satisfactorily. You need to apply a patch and run an add-on daemon,
but it's incredibly slow to respond, doesn't allow changing of voice
parameters like rate 
> and pitch, and hasn't been updated or changed since april according to
the filename. You can get the patch at:
> http://users.wpi.edu/~blinux
> if you want to try it.
> IMHO, the only good linux software synth is software dectalk, but that
costs $50 and speakup doesn't work with it yet. Hint, hint, speakup
developers? Any 
> chance it'll ever be supported?
> If you need help getting the software synthesizer working, let me
know. It can be a bit of work, especially if you're going to try
festival. Software Speech is 
> one of the two major areas in which linux lags behind, I think, the
other being OCR.
> HTH
> On Wed, 17 Sep 2003 23:12:47 -0400, Sina Bahram wrote:
> 
> >Hello, I read a few earlier posts on this and other lists about some 
> >16k voices availible for linux. I was wondering what would be 
> >availible, and if 16k voices are truly the highest quality availible 
> >these days.
> 
> 
> 
> 
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-- 
	
				Janina Sajka, Director
				Technology Research and Development
				Governmental Relations Group
				American Foundation for the Blind (AFB)

Email: janina@afb.net		Phone: (202) 408-8175

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