flite compile errors

Adam Myrow amyrow at midsouth.rr.com
Sat Aug 21 11:32:36 EDT 2004


How much swap space do you have?  Flite requires a *huge* amount of memory 
to build successfully.  If you have some free hard drive space, I'd set up 
a large temporary swap file.  Seriously, I'd suggest at least 1GB of swap. 
The reason it requires such a tremendous amount of memory to build is that 
the voice is entirely in C, and is like 20MB of source code.  I don't 
recall the exact numbers, but I was surprised that something which 
requires such a huge amount of memory to build can run in a fairly small 
amount once built.  Another option is a pre-built binary.  Somebody once 
put together a binary package for Slackware of Flite that used the 16-bit 
voice which improves fidelity somewhat.  I can't remember who it was, 
though.  Maybe, it's still in the list archive somewhere.

Flite is an OK synthesizer, but somewhat flat and lifeless sounding.  It 
also has some strange pronunciation rules.  For example, it consistently 
pronounces Linux as if the x at the end weren't there.  It also tries to 
process abbreviations which all the modern synthesizers seem to do.  It 
drives me nuts when they decide to treat part of an email address as an 
abbreviation.





More information about the Speakup mailing list