From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from invasion.mail.pas.earthlink.net ([207.217.120.254]) by speech.braille.uwo.ca with esmtp (Exim 3.36 #1 (Debian)) id 1BgUmY-0005Qz-00 for ; Fri, 02 Jul 2004 16:37:15 -0400 Received: from h-68-166-89-140.chcgilgm.covad.net ([68.166.89.140] helo=linserver.romuald.net.eu.org) by invasion.mail.pas.earthlink.net with asmtp (TLSv1:AES256-SHA:256) (Exim 4.34) id 1BgUmY-0007Rs-2q for speakup@braille.uwo.ca; Fri, 02 Jul 2004 13:37:14 -0700 Received: (qmail 6011 invoked by uid 1023); 2 Jul 2004 20:37:17 -0000 Date: Fri, 2 Jul 2004 15:37:17 -0500 From: Gregory Nowak To: "Speakup is a screen review system for Linux." Message-ID: <20040702203717.GC5790@romuald.net.eu.org> References: <20040702175825.GA4608@romuald.net.eu.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; x-action=pgp-signed; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: User-Agent: Mutt/1.4.2i X-PGP-Key: http://www.romuald.net.eu.org/pubkey.asc X-ELNK-Trace: cf6b0fd4be3eb51394f5150ab1c16ac08bb5361f5afbff6013de3d38ee87271c4e1e95eb68dcaa1f350badd9bab72f9c350badd9bab72f9c350badd9bab72f9c X-Originating-IP: 68.166.89.140 Subject: Re: What should Festival do better? (was: Speech Dispatcher 0.5 Release Candidate 1 available) X-BeenThere: speakup@braille.uwo.ca X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.4 Precedence: list Reply-To: "Speakup is a screen review system for Linux." List-Id: "Speakup is a screen review system for Linux." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Fri, 02 Jul 2004 20:37:15 -0000 -----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 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.3 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFA5cd97s9z/XlyUyARAjA9AJ9TZqP3t9Qmzob8D1ByrlrTThgNiQCgoUWJ yiT8CTiu4K0N5jhQnTjOSFM= =hzXl -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----