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

[nick G]

I know some one who could probably make the recordings for other voices, but
you never know.
Thanks
Nick
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Hynek Hanke" <hanke at volny.cz>
To: "Speakup is a screen review system for Linux." <speakup at braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Friday, July 02, 2004 5:48 PM
Subject: Re: What should Festival do better? (was: Speech Dispatcher
0.5Release Candidate 1 available)


> On Fri, Jul 02, 2004 at 04:01:48PM -0400, Jacob Schmude wrote:
> > 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.
>
> If Festival is doing this on your machine, something is *really*
> wrong.  I do agree that the responsiveness is still worse than in
> hardware synthesis or in Flite when you are scrolling fast through
> lines or doing something similar. But the delays I'm tuning here right
> now are in the order of tens of miliseconds and I have a 1.5GHz machine.
>
> (Also, the keys and characters get cached in the Festival output module
> if you use Festival through Speech Dispatcher, so they don't even have
> to be synthesized most of the time and typing input or moving a cursor
> should be quite fast.)
>
> I don't know what might cause such big delays on your machine, but it's
> definitely not a standard behavior of Festival and Speech Dispatcher.
> Could you please send me a Festival output module debug log after
> you install 0.5rc1?
>
> Still, even on my machine, much of the delays in communication with
> Festival are caused by issues in socket communication and similar, not
> by a lack of performance of my computer, so I think this can be fixed.
> However, if I downscale to 500MHz, a lack of performance becomes visible.
>
> > 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.
>
> I don't know about FreeTTS, but I've heard that importing Festival
> voices into Flite is not a trivial job :( But I agree with you that we
> need more (especially more languages!) and higher quality voices for
> Festival. The question is who will work on it, since it requires quite
> a lot of time to create a new voice. On the other side, Festival is
> very flexible in this regard. It uses an extension lisp-like language
> and many interesting things can be done this way without the need to
> modify C code in the core of Festival.
>
> With Regards & thanks everyone for an interesting discussion so far,
> Hynek
>
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