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

[Hynek Hanke]

On Fri, Jul 02, 2004 at 03:37:17PM -0500, Gregory Nowak wrote:
> 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. 

I'd most likely attribute this to some Gnopernicus or gnome-speech
problem. I don't believe these are problems in Festival alone.

Shuting up Festival is a bit tricky and there are different ways of
doing this. You can always retrieve only the wavefile from Festival
and play it in your application (like Speech Dispatcher does).
Then the issue of forcing it to stop is reduced to forcing to stop
an arbitrary wavefile.

But if you could find a text that, e.g. executed as an argument
of the (SayText "argument") function in Festival alone produces
such weird behavior, then I'm interested in this.

With Regards,
Hynek