[Sugar-devel] [DESIGN] Design Team agenda item: TTS, e-speak and voices

[Sridhar Dhanapalan]

On 19 July 2012 03:11, Chris Leonard <cjlhomeaddress at gmail.com> wrote:
> 3) Investigate (and importantly, document) the process of developing
> new voices or improving existing voices for e-speak (on assumption
> that we will stick with it as our speech engine).  A good pilot effort
> might be to fine-tune English (en_rp) for Australia (see OLPC_OZ
> tickets linked below) or Spanish, Latin America (es_la) voices for a
> national variant like Peru.  The main goal of such an effort should be
> not so much the voice itself (though either of these could be great to
> have), but understanding the process by which e-speak voice
> development is accomplished and developing internal expertise in this
> process that can be teamed up with other Sugar localizers as needed to
> develop additional voices for our other supported languages.

Thanks for raising this, Chris.

I think that as our available hardware becomes faster, we should be
investigating more powerful TTS engines. I don't know much on the
topic, but it looks like Festival and derivatives (like Flite) might
be worthy candidates.

Regards,
Sridhar


Sridhar Dhanapalan
Engineering Manager
One Laptop per Child Australia