Re: A Second Festival Module for Speakup

Re: A Second Festival Module for Speakup

[Owen Patrick Smith]

Ok we've figured out the problems.  The delay is caused by the fact that
we're sending the data to festival one word at a time so that if the
shutup character is recieved we can shutup the synth at the end of the
current word.  However this causes festival to delay for a fairly large
amount of time between each word because festival thinks that each word is
a separate statement.  We think that the delay between statements is
configurable at run-time and are going to e-mail Fesstivals dev team to
ask how to change it.  After that a small change to our middleware program
should fix the issue, I'll let you know when its been delt with.

As for the shutup function it works for us.  However please note that the
keymap that is on the website appears to be outdated.  The CVS Speakup
shutup key is (with numlock ON) keypad-minus.  Please let us know if that
was what you were using or if using keypad-minus fixes the problem.

HtH

Owen Smith
ender3rd@wpi.edu


On Wed, 2 Apr 2003, Jacob Schmude wrote:

> Hi
> My system specs are as follows:
> AMD Athlon XP2600, 2.133ghz
> Realtek ALC-650 audio chip (built into the motherboard)
> 80G hd with 8meg cache
> Those are the only specs I could think of that would help. As for the
> delay, it's just that, a delay of about a second between each word.
> Don't think this has to do with my computer speed (I've got plenty of
> that). Festival itself, when I use it without middleware (I.e. just type
> some text into it) doesn't exhibit the delay. Nor does it exhibit a
> delay when I use the festival_client program which comes with it. So the
> problem, near as I can tell, is centered on the module or the middleware
> program, or some interaction of the two.
>

RE: A Second Festival Module for Speakup

[Saqib Shaikh]

Hi Owen and all,

Have you considered using Flite rather than Festival?  Flite is much
smaller, much more responsive, and should be useable through the same
interface.

Saqib


-----Original Message-----
From: speakup-admin@braille.uwo.ca
[mailto:speakup-admin@braille.uwo.ca]On Behalf Of Owen Patrick Smith
Sent: 02 April 2003 21:48
To: Jacob Schmude
Cc: speakup@braille.uwo.ca
Subject: Re: A Second Festival Module for Speakup


Ok we've figured out the problems.  The delay is caused by the fact that
we're sending the data to festival one word at a time so that if the
shutup character is recieved we can shutup the synth at the end of the
current word.  However this causes festival to delay for a fairly large
amount of time between each word because festival thinks that each word is
a separate statement.  We think that the delay between statements is
configurable at run-time and are going to e-mail Fesstivals dev team to
ask how to change it.  After that a small change to our middleware program
should fix the issue, I'll let you know when its been delt with.

As for the shutup function it works for us.  However please note that the
keymap that is on the website appears to be outdated.  The CVS Speakup
shutup key is (with numlock ON) keypad-minus.  Please let us know if that
was what you were using or if using keypad-minus fixes the problem.

HtH

Owen Smith
ender3rd@wpi.edu


On Wed, 2 Apr 2003, Jacob Schmude wrote:

> Hi
> My system specs are as follows:
> AMD Athlon XP2600, 2.133ghz
> Realtek ALC-650 audio chip (built into the motherboard)
> 80G hd with 8meg cache
> Those are the only specs I could think of that would help. As for the
> delay, it's just that, a delay of about a second between each word.
> Don't think this has to do with my computer speed (I've got plenty of
> that). Festival itself, when I use it without middleware (I.e. just type
> some text into it) doesn't exhibit the delay. Nor does it exhibit a
> delay when I use the festival_client program which comes with it. So the
> problem, near as I can tell, is centered on the module or the middleware
> program, or some interaction of the two.
>



_______________________________________________
Speakup mailing list
Speakup@braille.uwo.ca
http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup

RE: A Second Festival Module for Speakup

[Owen Patrick Smith]

Yes we have, FLite is one of the programs which we are planning on adding
support for in the near future.  The nature of the middleware program is
such that it should be easy to add support for more programs, to be chosen
at run-time however we thought it best to get it working for one and then
improve the capabilities later.  Don't worry FLite support is coming.

Owen

On Wed, 2 Apr 2003, Saqib Shaikh wrote:

> Hi Owen and all,
>
> Have you considered using Flite rather than Festival?  Flite is much
> smaller, much more responsive, and should be useable through the same
> interface.
>
> Saqib
>

Re: A Second Festival Module for Speakup

[Jacob Schmude]

Hi
Well, keypad minus says "parked/unparked" just like it used to. Also, keypad enter was the shut-up key for my doubletalk which I ran this same CVS on 
until it quit a few days ago, so I don't see how the shut-up key is keypad minus. In any case it still won't shut up at all, even when pressing other keys with 
interrupt enabled. Nothing shuts it up. Not sure if it's relevant, but I'm using the ALSA drivers as the kernel-packaged drivers do not support my chip. Festival 
works fine with the alsa drivers, but you never know, I'm using it through the OSS emulation. Also I've noticed that before starting to speak something new, I 
here the letter "f". This happens whenever I initiate speech or when speakup starts talking on its own, it does not happen between words. I'm running 
festival 1.4.2 which seems to be the latest version. Is there a newer version I should be getting? Also, should it matter what voice I use (not that it made a 
difference on this system)? I rather like the mbrola_us2 voice and so have festival running that. But the regular US english voice (kal16K) produced the 
same results.
Out of curiosity, is mbrola one of the synths on the todo list? It's smaller than festival (not as small as flite) but has better sound quality.
On Wed, 2 Apr 2003 15:48:16 -0500 (EST), Owen Patrick Smith wrote:

>Ok we've figured out the problems.  The delay is caused by the fact that
>we're sending the data to festival one word at a time so that if the
>shutup character is recieved we can shutup the synth at the end of the
>current word.  However this causes festival to delay for a fairly large
>amount of time between each word because festival thinks that each word is
>a separate statement.  We think that the delay between statements is
>configurable at run-time and are going to e-mail Fesstivals dev team to
>ask how to change it.  After that a small change to our middleware program
>should fix the issue, I'll let you know when its been delt with.

Re: A Second Festival Module for Speakup

[Owen Patrick Smith]

The thing about the shutup key was a miscommunication between me and one
of my parteners when we were discussing what might be wrong.  Apparently
what happened is that Speakup clobbers certain characters and right before
we published our code we changed the SYNTH_CLEAR_CHAR to one of these
values as opposed to '!' which we had been using for debugging reasons.
Our website now has a link to an updated version of the code which should
resolve the shutup problem.  The new version should also amoriolate the
delay problem because our middleware program now sends the data to the TTS
program in one-line chunks instead of the previous one-word chunks, a
change that also should improve the intonation of the output.  However
this also means that, at present, the program will only shutup at the end
of a line.  A few other bugs were also fixed in this release, mostly
related to dealing with full buffers.  Please give the new code a try and
let us know if it helps to fix the problems.

As notes our code should be voice/ALSA/OSS independant and although there
is a slightly newer version of festival available (1.4.3) that should not
be an issue.  As to including Mbrola it is on our list although since it
does not have full TTS capability but only phoneme-to-sound an additional
layer of software will be required so it may be a while.

HtH

Owen

On Wed, 2 Apr 2003, Jacob Schmude wrote:

> Hi Well, keypad minus says "parked/unparked" just like it used to. Also,
> keypad enter was the shut-up key for my doubletalk which I ran this same
> CVS on until it quit a few days ago, so I don't see how the shut-up key
> is keypad minus. In any case it still won't shut up at all, even when
> pressing other keys with interrupt enabled. Nothing shuts it up. Not
> sure if it's relevant, but I'm using the ALSA drivers as the
> kernel-packaged drivers do not support my chip. Festival works fine with
> the alsa drivers, but you never know, I'm using it through the OSS
> emulation. Also I've noticed that before starting to speak something
> new, I here the letter "f". This happens whenever I initiate speech or
> when speakup starts talking on its own, it does not happen between
> words. I'm running festival 1.4.2 which seems to be the latest version.
> Is there a newer version I should be getting? Also, should it matter
> what voice I use (not that it made a difference on this system)? I
> rather like the mbrola_us2 voice and so have festival running that. But
> the regular US english voice (kal16K) produced the same results. Out of
> curiosity, is mbrola one of the synths on the todo list? It's smaller
> than festival (not as small as flite) but has better sound quality. On

Re: A Second Festival Module for Speakup

[Jacob Schmude]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1708 bytes --]

Hi
Thanks for working on this so quickly. The delay problem's gone, and the 
shut up key works as expected--almost. It does shut it up, but I 
hear"asterisk squeak asterisk" every time I use it, so I have to be careful 
not to use it more than once or it won't stop saying that. Before speakup 
speaks I also here the letter F.
A small suggestion: festival works best, when speaking by line, if a period 
(.) is put after the line. Just something I've noticed while working with 
it. At present the module seems to have a bit of trouble finishing all its 
statements at once, which is why I suggest this. Sure it may mess up the 
intonation a little but it'll still be the best software synth solution for 
linux. Not like festival really has much intonation in its default settings 
anyway. Hey, this is certainly progress. Too bad software synths won't be 
small enough to fit on root disks... but I suppose nothing can be done 
about that.


At 13:29 4/3/2003 -0500, you wrote:

>The thing about the shutup key was a miscommunication between me and one
>of my parteners when we were discussing what might be wrong.  Apparently
>what happened is that Speakup clobbers certain characters and right before
>we published our code we changed the SYNTH_CLEAR_CHAR to one of these
>values as opposed to '!' which we had been using for debugging reasons.
>Our website now has a link to an updated version of the code which should
>resolve the shutup problem.  The new version should also amoriolate the
>delay problem because our middleware program now sends the data to the TTS
>program in one-line chunks instead of the previous one-word chunks, a
>change that also should improve the intonation of the output.

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/plain, Size: 167 bytes --]


---
Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free.
Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com).
Version: 6.0.467 / Virus Database: 266 - Release Date: 4/1/2003

RE: A Second Festival Module for Speakup

[Owen Patrick Smith]

Ah yes, I should have said. The project website is:
http://users.wpi.edu/~blinux

there is a link to Festival most of the way down on the main page.

Hope you find it useful,

Owen Smith

On Thu, 3 Apr 2003, Dawes, Stephen wrote:

> What is your web site again Owen?
>
> Do you have a link to the festival site on it?
>
> I'm curious to give your stuff a try.
>
>
> Stephen Dawes  <B.A., B.Sc.>
> The City of Calgary                   |  Phone: (403) 268-5527
>    Web Business Office #8300          |  Fax:   (403) 268-6423
>    PO Box 2100 Postal Station M.      |  Email: Stephen.Dawes@calgary.ca
>    Calgary, Alberta, Canada. T2P 2M5  |  Web:  http://www.calgary.ca

RE: A Second Festival Module for Speakup

[Dawes, Stephen]

What is your web site again Owen?

Do you have a link to the festival site on it?

I'm curious to give your stuff a try.


Stephen Dawes  <B.A., B.Sc.>
The City of Calgary                   |  Phone: (403) 268-5527
   Web Business Office #8300          |  Fax:   (403) 268-6423
   PO Box 2100 Postal Station M.      |  Email: Stephen.Dawes@calgary.ca
   Calgary, Alberta, Canada. T2P 2M5  |  Web:  http://www.calgary.ca





NOTICE::
This communication is intended ONLY for the use of the person or entity named above and may contain information that is confidential or legally privileged. If you are not the intended recipient named above or a person responsible for delivering messages or communications to the intended recipient, YOU ARE HEREBY NOTIFIED that any use, distribution, or copying of this communication or any of the information contained in it is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately by telephone and then destroy or delete this communication, or return it to us by mail if requested by us. The City of Calgary thanks you for your attention and cooperation.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Owen Patrick Smith [mailto:ender3rd@WPI.EDU] 
> Sent: Thursday, April 03, 2003 11:30 AM
> To: Jacob Schmude
> Cc: speakup@braille.uwo.ca
> Subject: Re: A Second Festival Module for Speakup
> 
> 
> The thing about the shutup key was a miscommunication between 
> me and one of my parteners when we were discussing what might 
> be wrong.  Apparently what happened is that Speakup clobbers 
> certain characters and right before we published our code we 
> changed the SYNTH_CLEAR_CHAR to one of these values as 
> opposed to '!' which we had been using for debugging reasons. 
> Our website now has a link to an updated version of the code 
> which should resolve the shutup problem.  The new version 
> should also amoriolate the delay problem because our 
> middleware program now sends the data to the TTS program in 
> one-line chunks instead of the previous one-word chunks, a 
> change that also should improve the intonation of the output. 
>  However this also means that, at present, the program will 
> only shutup at the end of a line.  A few other bugs were also 
> fixed in this release, mostly related to dealing with full 
> buffers.  Please give the new code a try and let us know if 
> it helps to fix the problems.
> 
> As notes our code should be voice/ALSA/OSS independant and 
> although there is a slightly newer version of festival 
> available (1.4.3) that should not be an issue.  As to 
> including Mbrola it is on our list although since it does not 
> have full TTS capability but only phoneme-to-sound an 
> additional layer of software will be required so it may be a while.
> 
> HtH
> 
> Owen
> 
> On Wed, 2 Apr 2003, Jacob Schmude wrote:
> 
> > Hi Well, keypad minus says "parked/unparked" just like it used to. 
> > Also, keypad enter was the shut-up key for my doubletalk 
> which I ran 
> > this same CVS on until it quit a few days ago, so I don't 
> see how the 
> > shut-up key is keypad minus. In any case it still won't shut up at 
> > all, even when pressing other keys with interrupt enabled. Nothing 
> > shuts it up. Not sure if it's relevant, but I'm using the 
> ALSA drivers 
> > as the kernel-packaged drivers do not support my chip. 
> Festival works 
> > fine with the alsa drivers, but you never know, I'm using 
> it through 
> > the OSS emulation. Also I've noticed that before starting to speak 
> > something new, I here the letter "f". This happens whenever 
> I initiate 
> > speech or when speakup starts talking on its own, it does 
> not happen 
> > between words. I'm running festival 1.4.2 which seems to be 
> the latest 
> > version. Is there a newer version I should be getting? 
> Also, should it 
> > matter what voice I use (not that it made a difference on this 
> > system)? I rather like the mbrola_us2 voice and so have festival 
> > running that. But the regular US english voice (kal16K) 
> produced the 
> > same results. Out of curiosity, is mbrola one of the synths on the 
> > todo list? It's smaller than festival (not as small as 
> flite) but has 
> > better sound quality. On
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup@braille.uwo.ca 
> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/> speakup
> 

RE: A Second Festival Module for Speakup

[Owen Patrick Smith]

Yes, I meant FLite not EFLite.

Owen

On Wed, 2 Apr 2003, Shaikh, Saqib wrote:

> Just to confirm: do you mean Flite or Eflite?  Eflite is an Emacspeak
> server for Flite - and I don't think there's any point in making Speakup
> support the Emacspeak server.  But chances are you meant Flite, the
> actual synthesiser - but just to make sure.
>
> Saqib
>

RE: A Second Festival Module for Speakup

[Shaikh, Saqib]

Just to confirm: do you mean Flite or Eflite?  Eflite is an Emacspeak
server for Flite - and I don't think there's any point in making Speakup
support the Emacspeak server.  But chances are you meant Flite, the
actual synthesiser - but just to make sure.

Saqib


-----Original Message-----
From: Owen Patrick Smith [mailto:ender3rd@WPI.EDU] 
Sent: 02 April 2003 22:02
To: speakup@braille.uwo.ca
Subject: RE: A Second Festival Module for Speakup


Yes we have, FLite is one of the programs which we are planning on
adding support for in the near future.  The nature of the middleware
program is such that it should be easy to add support for more programs,
to be chosen at run-time however we thought it best to get it working
for one and then improve the capabilities later.  Don't worry FLite
support is coming.

Owen

On Wed, 2 Apr 2003, Saqib Shaikh wrote:

> Hi Owen and all,
>
> Have you considered using Flite rather than Festival?  Flite is much 
> smaller, much more responsive, and should be useable through the same 
> interface.
>
> Saqib
>



_______________________________________________
Speakup mailing list
Speakup@braille.uwo.ca
http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup

Re: A Second Festival Module for Speakup

[Owen Patrick Smith]

We thought that we'd fixed that problem, that was one of the main
difficulties that slowed development over the past couple of weeks.  The
delay I'm not sure about can you send me your system specs privately?  The
pitch_string bit is a known bug.

Thanks for your support,

Owen Smith
ender3rd@wpi.edu

On Tue, 1 Apr 2003, Jacob Schmude wrote:

> Hi I've actually got this module working. Compiled and ran just fine.
> Just one problem though: I can't shut it up! Is silencing speech one of
> the things that wasn't implemented yet? Because if it is that should be
> the first thing to get working, only thing worse than a computer that
> won't talk is one that talks too much. Also, I've noticed a long delay,
> probably about 1 second, between each word spoken and am hearing things
> like "pitch_string" in between keystrokes, and before reading starts. Is
> this normal for the current state of the module, or have I missed a step
> in installation? Hey, it talks, that's more than what it did before.
> Progress, right? I'll still use yasr with eflite until the speakup
> module can learn to shut up, though the voice quality is nowhere what I
> get when I link festival and mbrola together. Keep working on it, guys.
>

Re: A Second Festival Module for Speakup

[Jacob Schmude]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1777 bytes --]

Hi
I've actually got this module working. Compiled and ran just fine. Just one problem though: I can't shut it up! Is silencing speech one of the things that 
wasn't implemented yet? Because if it is that should be the first thing to get working, only thing worse than a computer that won't talk is one that talks too 
much. Also, I've noticed a long delay, probably about 1 second, between each word spoken and am hearing things like "pitch_string" in between 
keystrokes, and before reading starts. Is this normal for the current state of the module, or have I missed a step in installation? Hey, it talks, that's more than 
what it did before. Progress, right? I'll still use yasr with eflite until the speakup module can learn to shut up, though the voice quality is nowhere what I get 
when I link festival and mbrola together. Keep working on it, guys.

On Tue, 1 Apr 2003 14:51:20 -0500 (EST), Owen Patrick Smith wrote:

>Hello All,

>As some of you are aware myself a two other students have been working on
>getting Festival and Speakup to talk to one another for a while.  At this
>point we have a beta version of our code working.  Everything should work
>fine but the installation process needs streamlining and there are some
>features which are not yet implemented.  For some basic information about
>our project see http://users.wpi.edu/~blinux to get the code directly just
>go to http://www.wpi.edu/~blinux/speakup-modifications.tar.gz but be sure
>to read the installation instructions at
>http://www.wpi.edu/~blinux/installation_instructions.txt before you
>attempt to install.

>To help with our project please fill out a brief survey at
>http://www.wpi.edu/~ender3rd/cgi-bin/survey/survey.html

>Please reply with any comments, questions or bug reports.



[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 2288 bytes --]

A Second Festival Module for Speakup

[Owen Patrick Smith]

Hello All,

As some of you are aware myself a two other students have been working on
getting Festival and Speakup to talk to one another for a while.  At this
point we have a beta version of our code working.  Everything should work
fine but the installation process needs streamlining and there are some
features which are not yet implemented.  For some basic information about
our project see http://users.wpi.edu/~blinux to get the code directly just
go to http://www.wpi.edu/~blinux/speakup-modifications.tar.gz but be sure
to read the installation instructions at
http://www.wpi.edu/~blinux/installation_instructions.txt before you
attempt to install.

To help with our project please fill out a brief survey at
http://www.wpi.edu/~ender3rd/cgi-bin/survey/survey.html

Please reply with any comments, questions or bug reports.

HtH

Owen Smith
ender3rd@wpi.edu