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

[nick G]

I use Keven, and it takes about a half of a second to respond.  Also, I
can't get it to shut the hell up!  However, the voice does sound decent,
It's decently human, it just has too many pawses, and should respond that
much faster.
Thanks,
Nick
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jacob Schmude" <jschmude at adelphia.net>
To: "Speakup is a screen review system for Linux." <speakup at braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Friday, July 02, 2004 4:01 PM
Subject: Re: What should Festival do better? (was: Speech Dispatcher 0.5
Release Candidate 1 available)


> 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-----
> GN> Hash: SHA1
> 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).
>
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