What should Festival do better? (was: Speech Dispatcher 0.5 Release Candidate 1 available)

[Jacob Schmude]

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.

On Fri, 2 Jul 2004, Gregory Nowak wrote:

GN> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
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GN> 
GN> Well, frankly, festival sounds like garbage, worst then the Braille 'n
GN> Speak or accent in my opinion. When I was using it with gnopernicus, I
GN> found myself spending more time on understanding what festival was
GN> saying, then I did on actually using gnopernicus and using gnome. Yes,
GN> I know, festival is GPL software, and we should be happy that we have
GN> a GPL software synth at all, but Hynek did ask for comments, so I'm
GN> posting my own in an attempt to answer his question of what is wrong
GN> with festival in my opinion, and not in an attempt to start a flame
GN> war (smile).