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

[Gregory Nowak]

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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.
> 

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