[IAEP] [Sugar-devel] More 'human' voice synth (TTS)

[Rafael Ortiz]

On Tue, Jun 21, 2011 at 9:10 AM, James Simmons <nicestep at gmail.com> wrote:

> I've had some experience with TTS from developing Read Etexts.
> Originally, I used speech-dispatcher, which provided a way of writing
> apps that used TTS without knowing what TTS engine was being used
> underneath.  There were a couple of problems with that.  Since more
> than one engine was supported, the RPM for speech-dispatcher needed to
> have them all installed.  Second, you needed to configure it.
>
> Aleksey Lim came up with a gstreamer plugin for espeak that needed no
> configuration, and that's what we've been using ever since.
>
> One problem we have with TTS is doing highlighting.  An XO laptop is
> not fast enough to make the highlighted word keep up with the word
> being spoken.  (The gstreamer plugin does callbacks just before it
> speaks a word, and these callbacks are used to highlight the words).
> A slightly faster computer is enough to resolve the problem.  If
> Festival needed more horsepower to run than espeak it would make a bad
> situation worse.
>
> Also, listening to festival outputs by Paul, I don't notice a
real improvement on the robotic voice feeling.



James Simmons
>
>
> On Tue, Jun 21, 2011 at 8:43 AM, Paul Fox <pgf at laptop.org> wrote:
> > sridhar wrote:
> >  > I'm wondering if there's anything we can do to make TTS sound more
> >  > 'human'. We'd like to be able to use the XOs to teach English
> >  > literacy, but the espeak voices are very robotic.
> >  >
> >  > My understanding is that espeak is optimised for low-power devices
> >  > (great for XOs) and clear (if robotic) speech. Would it be feasible to
> >  > switch to something else, like festival?
> >
> > i've run festival as part of my home automation system for many many
> > years, including the last 3 or so on an XO-1 (debxo) which acts as my
> > current HA server.
> >
> > the first secret is to run it in client/server mode, to avoid the
> > server startup latency on every enunciation.  but even after that, i
> > think the latency will be too high for your application.  i just
> > tested it:  given a moderate english sentence, it took 3 seconds to
> > produce output.  (i hide this on my system by caching utterances --
> > that's more feasible in a menuing system than when teaching literacy.)
> >    http://dev.laptop.org/~pgf/junk/festival_out.wav   (5 seconds on
> XO-1)
> >
> > flite is a lower cost version of festival that might be appropriate.
> > it seems to reduce the conversion time to about half a second.
> > but the quality suffers as well.
> >    http://dev.laptop.org/~pgf/junk/flite_out.wav   (.5 seconds on XO-1)
> >
> > fyi, current festival server process footprint:
> > root       999  0.0  9.4  26668 20004 ?        Ss   Jun06  10:03
> /usr/bin/festival --server /usr/local/etc/nosil.scm
> >
> > i haven't used espeak -- i suspect there are API interfaces that are
> > far richer than what i'm doing from the shell commandline.  i don't
> > know how one might access festival at that level.
> >
> > paul
> >
> >  >
> >  > This is some food for thought:
> >  > http://braille.uwo.ca/pipermail/speakup/2008-July/046755.html
> >  >
> >  > Sridhar
> >  >
> >  >
> >  > Sridhar Dhanapalan
> >  > Technical Manager
> >  > One Laptop per Child Australia
> >  > M: +61 425 239 701
> >  > E: sridhar at laptop.org.au
> >  > A: G.P.O. Box 731
> >  >      Sydney, NSW 2001
> >  > W: www.laptop.org.au
> >  > _______________________________________________
> >  > Devel mailing list
> >  > Devel at lists.laptop.org
> >  > http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
> >
> > =---------------------
> >  paul fox, pgf at laptop.org
> > _______________________________________________
> > IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
> > IAEP at lists.sugarlabs.org
> > http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
> >
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