Re: What should Festival do better? (was: Speech Dispatcher 0.5 Release Candidate 1 available)

Re: What should Festival do better? (was: Speech Dispatcher 0.5 Release Candidate 1 available)

[Gregory Nowak]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Well, frankly, festival sounds like garbage, worst then the Braille 'n
Speak or accent in my opinion. When I was using it with gnopernicus, I
found myself spending more time on understanding what festival was
saying, then I did on actually using gnopernicus and using gnome. Yes,
I know, festival is GPL software, and we should be happy that we have
a GPL software synth at all, but Hynek did ask for comments, so I'm
posting my own in an attempt to answer his question of what is wrong
with festival in my opinion, and not in an attempt to start a flame
war (smile).
 
Greg

On Fri, Jul 02, 2004 at 06:51:01PM +0200, Hynek Hanke wrote:
> What's the problem with Festival? I mean, what should Festival do
better
> so that you could use it instead of Dectalk or Eloquence? Or the
other
> hardware synthesizers.
>
> Of course, this is also a question for others.
>
> Regards,
> Hynek
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup@braille.uwo.ca
> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
>
>
>
>
>
 
- -- 
Free domains: http://www.eu.org/ or mail dns-manager@EU.org

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Re: What should Festival do better? (was: Speech Dispatcher 0.5 Release Candidate 1 available)

[Cheryl Homiak]

I have to agree with Greg; festival really doesn't sound very good at all.


-- 
Cheryl

"Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also."

Re: What should Festival do better? (was: Speech Dispatcher 0.5 Release Candidate 1 available)

[Jayson Smith]

I wonder if peoples' complaints are with Festival or with the voices?  I
don't think it sounds very good as compared to Dectalk, et al.  Would better
voices help it or would it need a rewrite of parts of the tts process?

----- Original Message -----
From: "Cheryl Homiak" <chomiak@charter.net>
To: "Speakup is a screen review system for Linux." <speakup@braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Friday, July 02, 2004 2:36 PM
Subject: Re: What should Festival do better? (was: Speech Dispatcher 0.5
Release Candidate 1 available)


> I have to agree with Greg; festival really doesn't sound very good at all.
>
>
> --
> Cheryl
>
> "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also."
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup@braille.uwo.ca
> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup

Re: What should Festival do better? (was: Speech Dispatcher 0.5 Release Candidate 1 available)

[Jacob Schmude]

Hi
	I must agree with Greg on this one. It's a little better if you 
use the kal16 voice, but it's still nowhere near anything like dec or 
eloquence, or even the SSI-263 based synths like the artic or bns. 
However, the big issue for me is responsiveness. This, to put it frankly, 
festival is not. It shuts up just fine, but it takes at least a second to 
begin speaking. This is a 2.13ghz athlon I'm talking about, and it takes a 
second to speak a short line. If this line happens to be of a long length 
(such as an email message listing) festival takes 3 seconds or more to 
start speaking. This, in my mind, is simply unacceptable. I haven't had a 
chance to grab 0.5rc1 yet, maybe this responsiveness has been improved. 
After responsiveness gets fixed, what we need for festival is a 
high-quality voice set. Come to think of it, flite and FreeTTS could use 
this as well. At the moment festival's voice has no inflection to speak 
of, only has pauses for punctuations, and frankly gives me a headache if I 
listen to it for too long. If these issues were fixed I believe festival 
would be a viable option. There's no way I'm going to go buy Cepstral, as 
the $30 per voice policy doesn't sit well with me, I consider that a 
rip-off, I don't care how good the voice sounds. I'll be sticking with 
dectalk 5 for now, but if festival had a better voice and better 
responsiveness, I'd most definitely use it. And, of course, all flames 
will be directed to /dev/null.

On Fri, 2 Jul 2004, Gregory Nowak wrote:

GN> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
GN> Hash: SHA1
GN> 
GN> Well, frankly, festival sounds like garbage, worst then the Braille 'n
GN> Speak or accent in my opinion. When I was using it with gnopernicus, I
GN> found myself spending more time on understanding what festival was
GN> saying, then I did on actually using gnopernicus and using gnome. Yes,
GN> I know, festival is GPL software, and we should be happy that we have
GN> a GPL software synth at all, but Hynek did ask for comments, so I'm
GN> posting my own in an attempt to answer his question of what is wrong
GN> with festival in my opinion, and not in an attempt to start a flame
GN> war (smile).

Re: What should Festival do better? (was: Speech Dispatcher 0.5 Release Candidate 1 available)

[Gregory Nowak]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

I've actually had the opposite experience with festival and
gnopernicus. It started speaking right away for me just fine, but I
had to wait forever for it to finish, and couldn't shut it up. The
majority of text was spoken just fine, until I got to the last few
words (like 2-3 words to the end). Then, it would speak word 1, about
5 second pause, word 2, 5 second pause, and the last word. Adding this
problem to the clarity of the speech from festival, made for a
distracting screen-reading experience. This was on a 1.1 GHz Celeron.
BTW, this was not a gnopernicus problem, it was a festival problem,
since it happened even when just typing sentences on the keyboard
for festival to speak.

Greg


On Fri, Jul 02, 2004 at 04:01:48PM -0400, Jacob Schmude wrote:
> Hi
> 	I must agree with Greg on this one. It's a little better if you 
> use the kal16 voice, but it's still nowhere near anything like dec or 
> eloquence, or even the SSI-263 based synths like the artic or bns. 
> However, the big issue for me is responsiveness. This, to put it frankly, 
> festival is not. It shuts up just fine, but it takes at least a second to 
> begin speaking. This is a 2.13ghz athlon I'm talking about, and it takes a 
> second to speak a short line. If this line happens to be of a long length 
> (such as an email message listing) festival takes 3 seconds or more to 
> start speaking. This, in my mind, is simply unacceptable. I haven't had a 
> chance to grab 0.5rc1 yet, maybe this responsiveness has been improved. 
> After responsiveness gets fixed, what we need for festival is a 
> high-quality voice set. Come to think of it, flite and FreeTTS could use 
> this as well. At the moment festival's voice has no inflection to speak 
> of, only has pauses for punctuations, and frankly gives me a headache if I 
> listen to it for too long. If these issues were fixed I believe festival 
> would be a viable option. There's no way I'm going to go buy Cepstral, as 
> the $30 per voice policy doesn't sit well with me, I consider that a 
> rip-off, I don't care how good the voice sounds. I'll be sticking with 
> dectalk 5 for now, but if festival had a better voice and better 
> responsiveness, I'd most definitely use it. And, of course, all flames 
> will be directed to /dev/null.
> 

- -- 
Free domains: http://www.eu.org/ or mail dns-manager@EU.org

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Re: What should Festival do better? (was: Speech Dispatcher 0.5 Release Candidate 1 available)

[Hynek Hanke]

On Fri, Jul 02, 2004 at 03:37:17PM -0500, Gregory Nowak wrote:
> I've actually had the opposite experience with festival and
> gnopernicus. It started speaking right away for me just fine, but I
> had to wait forever for it to finish, and couldn't shut it up.
> The majority of text was spoken just fine, until I got to the last few
> words (like 2-3 words to the end). Then, it would speak word 1, about
> 5 second pause, word 2, 5 second pause, and the last word. 

I'd most likely attribute this to some Gnopernicus or gnome-speech
problem. I don't believe these are problems in Festival alone.

Shuting up Festival is a bit tricky and there are different ways of
doing this. You can always retrieve only the wavefile from Festival
and play it in your application (like Speech Dispatcher does).
Then the issue of forcing it to stop is reduced to forcing to stop
an arbitrary wavefile.

But if you could find a text that, e.g. executed as an argument
of the (SayText "argument") function in Festival alone produces
such weird behavior, then I'm interested in this.

With Regards,
Hynek

Re: What should Festival do better? (was: Speech Dispatcher 0.5 Release Candidate 1 available)

[nick G]

I use Keven, and it takes about a half of a second to respond.  Also, I
can't get it to shut the hell up!  However, the voice does sound decent,
It's decently human, it just has too many pawses, and should respond that
much faster.
Thanks,
Nick
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jacob Schmude" <jschmude@adelphia.net>
To: "Speakup is a screen review system for Linux." <speakup@braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Friday, July 02, 2004 4:01 PM
Subject: Re: What should Festival do better? (was: Speech Dispatcher 0.5
Release Candidate 1 available)


> Hi
> I must agree with Greg on this one. It's a little better if you
> use the kal16 voice, but it's still nowhere near anything like dec or
> eloquence, or even the SSI-263 based synths like the artic or bns.
> However, the big issue for me is responsiveness. This, to put it frankly,
> festival is not. It shuts up just fine, but it takes at least a second to
> begin speaking. This is a 2.13ghz athlon I'm talking about, and it takes a
> second to speak a short line. If this line happens to be of a long length
> (such as an email message listing) festival takes 3 seconds or more to
> start speaking. This, in my mind, is simply unacceptable. I haven't had a
> chance to grab 0.5rc1 yet, maybe this responsiveness has been improved.
> After responsiveness gets fixed, what we need for festival is a
> high-quality voice set. Come to think of it, flite and FreeTTS could use
> this as well. At the moment festival's voice has no inflection to speak
> of, only has pauses for punctuations, and frankly gives me a headache if I
> listen to it for too long. If these issues were fixed I believe festival
> would be a viable option. There's no way I'm going to go buy Cepstral, as
> the $30 per voice policy doesn't sit well with me, I consider that a
> rip-off, I don't care how good the voice sounds. I'll be sticking with
> dectalk 5 for now, but if festival had a better voice and better
> responsiveness, I'd most definitely use it. And, of course, all flames
> will be directed to /dev/null.
>
> On Fri, 2 Jul 2004, Gregory Nowak wrote:
>
> GN> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> GN> Hash: SHA1
> GN>
> GN> Well, frankly, festival sounds like garbage, worst then the Braille 'n
> GN> Speak or accent in my opinion. When I was using it with gnopernicus, I
> GN> found myself spending more time on understanding what festival was
> GN> saying, then I did on actually using gnopernicus and using gnome. Yes,
> GN> I know, festival is GPL software, and we should be happy that we have
> GN> a GPL software synth at all, but Hynek did ask for comments, so I'm
> GN> posting my own in an attempt to answer his question of what is wrong
> GN> with festival in my opinion, and not in an attempt to start a flame
> GN> war (smile).
>
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup@braille.uwo.ca
> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup

Re: What should Festival do better? (was: Speech Dispatcher 0.5 Release Candidate 1 available)

[Hynek Hanke]

On Fri, Jul 02, 2004 at 04:01:48PM -0400, Jacob Schmude wrote:
> However, the big issue for me is responsiveness. This, to put it frankly, 
> festival is not. It shuts up just fine, but it takes at least a second to 
> begin speaking. This is a 2.13ghz athlon I'm talking about, and it takes a 
> second to speak a short line. If this line happens to be of a long length 
> (such as an email message listing) festival takes 3 seconds or more to 
> start speaking.

If Festival is doing this on your machine, something is *really*
wrong.  I do agree that the responsiveness is still worse than in
hardware synthesis or in Flite when you are scrolling fast through
lines or doing something similar. But the delays I'm tuning here right
now are in the order of tens of miliseconds and I have a 1.5GHz machine.

(Also, the keys and characters get cached in the Festival output module
if you use Festival through Speech Dispatcher, so they don't even have
to be synthesized most of the time and typing input or moving a cursor
should be quite fast.)

I don't know what might cause such big delays on your machine, but it's
definitely not a standard behavior of Festival and Speech Dispatcher.
Could you please send me a Festival output module debug log after
you install 0.5rc1?

Still, even on my machine, much of the delays in communication with
Festival are caused by issues in socket communication and similar, not
by a lack of performance of my computer, so I think this can be fixed.
However, if I downscale to 500MHz, a lack of performance becomes visible.

> After responsiveness gets fixed, what we need for festival is a 
> high-quality voice set. 
> Come to think of it, flite and FreeTTS could use 
> this as well.

I don't know about FreeTTS, but I've heard that importing Festival
voices into Flite is not a trivial job :( But I agree with you that we
need more (especially more languages!) and higher quality voices for
Festival. The question is who will work on it, since it requires quite
a lot of time to create a new voice. On the other side, Festival is
very flexible in this regard. It uses an extension lisp-like language
and many interesting things can be done this way without the need to
modify C code in the core of Festival.

With Regards & thanks everyone for an interesting discussion so far,
Hynek

Re: What should Festival do better? (was: Speech Dispatcher 0.5Release Candidate 1 available)

[nick G]

I know some one who could probably make the recordings for other voices, but
you never know.
Thanks
Nick
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Hynek Hanke" <hanke@volny.cz>
To: "Speakup is a screen review system for Linux." <speakup@braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Friday, July 02, 2004 5:48 PM
Subject: Re: What should Festival do better? (was: Speech Dispatcher
0.5Release Candidate 1 available)


> On Fri, Jul 02, 2004 at 04:01:48PM -0400, Jacob Schmude wrote:
> > However, the big issue for me is responsiveness. This, to put it
frankly,
> > festival is not. It shuts up just fine, but it takes at least a second
to
> > begin speaking. This is a 2.13ghz athlon I'm talking about, and it takes
a
> > second to speak a short line. If this line happens to be of a long
length
> > (such as an email message listing) festival takes 3 seconds or more to
> > start speaking.
>
> If Festival is doing this on your machine, something is *really*
> wrong.  I do agree that the responsiveness is still worse than in
> hardware synthesis or in Flite when you are scrolling fast through
> lines or doing something similar. But the delays I'm tuning here right
> now are in the order of tens of miliseconds and I have a 1.5GHz machine.
>
> (Also, the keys and characters get cached in the Festival output module
> if you use Festival through Speech Dispatcher, so they don't even have
> to be synthesized most of the time and typing input or moving a cursor
> should be quite fast.)
>
> I don't know what might cause such big delays on your machine, but it's
> definitely not a standard behavior of Festival and Speech Dispatcher.
> Could you please send me a Festival output module debug log after
> you install 0.5rc1?
>
> Still, even on my machine, much of the delays in communication with
> Festival are caused by issues in socket communication and similar, not
> by a lack of performance of my computer, so I think this can be fixed.
> However, if I downscale to 500MHz, a lack of performance becomes visible.
>
> > After responsiveness gets fixed, what we need for festival is a
> > high-quality voice set.
> > Come to think of it, flite and FreeTTS could use
> > this as well.
>
> I don't know about FreeTTS, but I've heard that importing Festival
> voices into Flite is not a trivial job :( But I agree with you that we
> need more (especially more languages!) and higher quality voices for
> Festival. The question is who will work on it, since it requires quite
> a lot of time to create a new voice. On the other side, Festival is
> very flexible in this regard. It uses an extension lisp-like language
> and many interesting things can be done this way without the need to
> modify C code in the core of Festival.
>
> With Regards & thanks everyone for an interesting discussion so far,
> Hynek
>
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup@braille.uwo.ca
> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup

Re: What should Festival do better? (was: Speech Dispatcher 0.5 Release Candidate 1 available)

[ace]

Since I am not yet using Linux, I have not had a chance to hear what the 
various speech synthesizers for Linux sound like. IF someone could send me 
a small wav/MP3 (or tell me where I could acquire sound samples of these 
synthesizers) I'd appreciate it. I wish to use software speech as opposed 
to my DEC Express when I finally get Linux on here.

At 10:58 AM 7/2/04, you wrote:
>-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>Hash: SHA1
>
>Well, frankly, festival sounds like garbage, worst then the Braille 'n
>Speak or accent in my opinion. When I was using it with gnopernicus, I
>found myself spending more time on understanding what festival was
>saying, then I did on actually using gnopernicus and using gnome. Yes,
>I know, festival is GPL software, and we should be happy that we have
>a GPL software synth at all, but Hynek did ask for comments, so I'm
>posting my own in an attempt to answer his question of what is wrong
>with festival in my opinion, and not in an attempt to start a flame
>war (smile).
>
>Greg
>
>On Fri, Jul 02, 2004 at 06:51:01PM +0200, Hynek Hanke wrote:
> > What's the problem with Festival? I mean, what should Festival do
>better
> > so that you could use it instead of Dectalk or Eloquence? Or the
>other
> > hardware synthesizers.
> >
> > Of course, this is also a question for others.
> >
> > Regards,
> > Hynek
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Speakup mailing list
> > Speakup@braille.uwo.ca
> > http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
>
>- --
>Free domains: http://www.eu.org/ or mail dns-manager@EU.org
>
>-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
>Version: GnuPG v1.2.3 (GNU/Linux)
>
>iD8DBQFA5aJB7s9z/XlyUyARAsrpAJ9BUKbQRfp7+jR1Cs+wnafT416+pQCgqJul
>Gs3CPrEzzIp9jr1vpwzoxmg=
>=uWFA
>-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
>
>_______________________________________________
>Speakup mailing list
>Speakup@braille.uwo.ca
>http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup

Robby
ace@tundra-com.net
Network Administrator -
irc.talkingirc.com
http://www.talkingirc.com 

Re: What should Festival do better? (was: Speech Dispatcher 0.5 Release Candidate 1 available)

[Jayson Smith]

Hi,
For a small demo of Festival, grab http://jaybird.no-ip.info/festival.wav
Hope this helps.
Jayson

----- Original Message -----
From: "ace" <ace@tundra-com.net>
To: "Speakup is a screen review system for Linux." <speakup@braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Friday, July 02, 2004 6:24 PM
Subject: Re: What should Festival do better? (was: Speech Dispatcher 0.5
Release Candidate 1 available)


> Since I am not yet using Linux, I have not had a chance to hear what the
> various speech synthesizers for Linux sound like. IF someone could send me
> a small wav/MP3 (or tell me where I could acquire sound samples of these
> synthesizers) I'd appreciate it. I wish to use software speech as opposed
> to my DEC Express when I finally get Linux on here.
>
> At 10:58 AM 7/2/04, you wrote:
> >-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> >Hash: SHA1
> >
> >Well, frankly, festival sounds like garbage, worst then the Braille 'n
> >Speak or accent in my opinion. When I was using it with gnopernicus, I
> >found myself spending more time on understanding what festival was
> >saying, then I did on actually using gnopernicus and using gnome. Yes,
> >I know, festival is GPL software, and we should be happy that we have
> >a GPL software synth at all, but Hynek did ask for comments, so I'm
> >posting my own in an attempt to answer his question of what is wrong
> >with festival in my opinion, and not in an attempt to start a flame
> >war (smile).
> >
> >Greg
> >
> >On Fri, Jul 02, 2004 at 06:51:01PM +0200, Hynek Hanke wrote:
> > > What's the problem with Festival? I mean, what should Festival do
> >better
> > > so that you could use it instead of Dectalk or Eloquence? Or the
> >other
> > > hardware synthesizers.
> > >
> > > Of course, this is also a question for others.
> > >
> > > Regards,
> > > Hynek
> > >
> > >
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > Speakup mailing list
> > > Speakup@braille.uwo.ca
> > > http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> >
> >- --
> >Free domains: http://www.eu.org/ or mail dns-manager@EU.org
> >
> >-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
> >Version: GnuPG v1.2.3 (GNU/Linux)
> >
> >iD8DBQFA5aJB7s9z/XlyUyARAsrpAJ9BUKbQRfp7+jR1Cs+wnafT416+pQCgqJul
> >Gs3CPrEzzIp9jr1vpwzoxmg=
> >=uWFA
> >-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
> >
> >_______________________________________________
> >Speakup mailing list
> >Speakup@braille.uwo.ca
> >http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
>
> Robby
> ace@tundra-com.net
> Network Administrator -
> irc.talkingirc.com
> http://www.talkingirc.com
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup@braille.uwo.ca
> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup

Re: What should Festival do better? (was: Speech Dispatcher 0.5Release Candidate 1 available)

[Garrett Klein]

Festival is under a BSD-style license.

Garrett
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Gregory Nowak" <greg@romuald.net.eu.org>
To: <speakup@braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Friday, July 02, 2004 12:58 PM
Subject: Re: What should Festival do better? (was: Speech Dispatcher
0.5Release Candidate 1 available)


> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> Well, frankly, festival sounds like garbage, worst then the Braille 'n
> Speak or accent in my opinion. When I was using it with gnopernicus, I
> found myself spending more time on understanding what festival was
> saying, then I did on actually using gnopernicus and using gnome. Yes,
> I know, festival is GPL software, and we should be happy that we have
> a GPL software synth at all, but Hynek did ask for comments, so I'm
> posting my own in an attempt to answer his question of what is wrong
> with festival in my opinion, and not in an attempt to start a flame
> war (smile).
>
> Greg
>
> On Fri, Jul 02, 2004 at 06:51:01PM +0200, Hynek Hanke wrote:
> > What's the problem with Festival? I mean, what should Festival do
> better
> > so that you could use it instead of Dectalk or Eloquence? Or the
> other
> > hardware synthesizers.
> >
> > Of course, this is also a question for others.
> >
> > Regards,
> > Hynek
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Speakup mailing list
> > Speakup@braille.uwo.ca
> > http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
>
> - -- 
> Free domains: http://www.eu.org/ or mail dns-manager@EU.org
>
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
> Version: GnuPG v1.2.3 (GNU/Linux)
>
> iD8DBQFA5aJB7s9z/XlyUyARAsrpAJ9BUKbQRfp7+jR1Cs+wnafT416+pQCgqJul
> Gs3CPrEzzIp9jr1vpwzoxmg=
> =uWFA
> -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
>
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup@braille.uwo.ca
> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
>

Re: What should Festival do better? (was: Speech Dispatcher 0.5Release Candidate 1 available)

[Gregory Nowak]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Oops, my mistake.

Greg


On Fri, Jul 02, 2004 at 09:06:14PM -0500, Garrett Klein wrote:
> Festival is under a BSD-style license.
> 
> Garrett

- -- 
Free domains: http://www.eu.org/ or mail dns-manager@EU.org

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Speech Dispatcher 0.5 Release Candidate 1 available

[Hynek Hanke]

Speech Dispatcher 0.5 Release Candidate 1
=========================================

The Brailcom organization is happy to announce the availability of
Speech Dispatcher 0.5-rc1 developed as a part of the Free(b)Soft
project.

This is a Release Candidate version, so we invite everyone to help
us testing it before we finally release the 0.5 version.

* What is Speech Dispatcher?

  Speech Dispatcher is a device independent layer for speech
  synthesis, developed with the goal of making the usage of speech
  synthesis easier for application programmers. It takes care of most
  of the tasks necessary to solve in speech enabled applications. What
  is a very high level GUI library to graphics, Speech Dispatcher is
  to speech synthesis.

  The architecture of Speech Dispatcher is based on a proven
  client/server model. The basic means of client communication
  with Speech Dispatcher is through a TCP connection using the Speech
  Synthesis Interface Protocol (SSIP).

  Key Speech Dispatcher features are:

  - Message priority model that allows multiple simultaneous
    connections to Speech Dispatcher from one or more clients
    and tries to provide the user with the most important messages.

  - Different output modules that talk to different synthesizers
    so that the programmer doesn't need to care which particular
    synthesizer is being used. Currently Festival, Flite, Epos and
    (non-free) Dectalk software are supported.

  - Client-based configuration allows users to configure different
    settings for different clients that connect to Speech Dispatcher.

  - Simple interface for programs written in C, C++ provided through a
    shared library, Common Lisp and Guile interface. The
    Python interface is being worked on. An Elisp library is
    developed as a sperate project speechd-el. Possibly an interface
    to any other language can be developed.

* What is new in 0.5-rc1?

 - SSIP now supports SSML (Speech Synthesis Markup Language) messages.

 - Communication with Festival is highly improved.

 - Improved DTK Software Synthesis support.

 NOTE: The communication mode of the Festival output module (SSML mode)
 is incompatible with the previous festival-freebsoft-utils releases.
 You need to install festival-freebsoft-utils 0.3 or higher!

* Where to get it?

  You can get the distribution tarball of the released version from
  http://www.freebsoft.org/pub/projects/speechd/speech-dispatcher-0.5-rc1.tar.gz

  You also need to get festival-freebsoft-utils in version 0.3 or newer
  http://www.freebsoft.org/pub/projects/festival-freebsoft-utils/

  We recommend you to fetch the sound icons Speech Dispatcher can use as
  well. They are available at
  http://www.freebsoft.org/pub/projects/sound-icons/sound-icons-0.1.tar.gz

  Corresponding Debian packages will be available at your
  Debian distribution mirror as soon as the official version 0.5 is released.
  (We would highly appreciate any help with RPM distribution!)

  The home page of the project is http://www.freebsoft.org/speechd

* How to report bugs?

  Please report bugs at <speechd@bugs.freebsoft.org>. For other
  contact please use <speechd@freebsoft.org>
  

Happy synthesizing!

Re: Speech Dispatcher 0.5 Release Candidate 1 available

[Hart Larry]

Hey Hynek:  You say this project supports non-free Dectalk, but would I have a 
chance of running it with a decpc internal?  Thanks so much in advance
Hart

Re: Speech Dispatcher 0.5 Release Candidate 1 available

[Hynek Hanke]

On Fri, Jul 02, 2004 at 04:38:28AM -0700, Hart Larry wrote:
> Hey Hynek:  You say this project supports non-free Dectalk, but would I 
> have a chance of running it with a decpc internal?

The current output module for DecTalk Software doesn't work
with the hardware Dectalk PC internal.

Maybe you can still make it to work in a simple way. Does the
internal Decatalk have some simple line client like the
DecTalk's `say'?

Btw. Did you try Festival already? It supports much more features.

With Regards,
Hynek

Re: Speech Dispatcher 0.5 Release Candidate 1 available

[Hart Larry]

Well, Hynek, so far the only speech I am really happy with are dectalk and 
eliquence--thanks
Hart

What should Festival do better? (was: Speech Dispatcher 0.5 Release Candidate 1 available)

[Hynek Hanke]

On Fri, Jul 02, 2004 at 08:25:25AM -0700, Hart Larry wrote:
> Well, Hynek, so far the only speech I am really happy with are dectalk and 
> eliquence--thanks

What's the problem with Festival? I mean, what should Festival do better
so that you could use it instead of Dectalk or Eloquence? Or the other
hardware synthesizers.

Of course, this is also a question for others.

Regards,
Hynek