ViaVoice Tidbits

[hank]

are you writing your own linux distro?
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Doug Sutherland" <wearable at cogeco.ca>
To: <speakup at braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Tuesday, March 09, 2004 8:33 PM
Subject: ViaVoice Tidbits


> Hmmm this is interesting regarding viavoice ...
> 
> I really like the sound of this software synth, and it wouldn't work on
> slackware 9.1, so I decided to build a custom linux system from source
> (using the linuxfromscratch books).
> 
> I determined that viavoice cannot deal with glibc 3.2.2 or higher. So I
> build a system with glibc 3.2.1, but compiled all of the newer software
> for it. I was hoping viavoice would just work, but it failed trying to
> find a certain libstdc++ shared object. I got it working by copying the
> c++ libraries from slackware 9.1 into /opt/lib/slackware and adding this
> directory to ld.so.conf. It worked! Perhaps this is something that is
> worth trying if you can't get viavoice working but have glibc 3.2.1 or
> older. Note that I had to create the same symbolic links that patrick
> used in slack9, but in the /opt/lib/slackware dir. To do so, I just
> took the lines right out of his doinst.sh for that package. That's the
> first interesting tidbit.
> 
> This part is good, not only can I use the TTS, but the compiler is also
> working fine with that shared object from slackware :) I am now writing
> code with direct calls into the viavoice ECI API.
> 
> Now here's another interesting tidbit. There are 3 versions of the TTS,
> they are Outloud 5.0, Outloud 5.1, and TTS 5.1. I made a script that
> would configure my system for any of these three on the fly. There are
> only 3 files needed for viavoice TTS, the enu50.so (dictionary), the
> libibmeci50.so (runtime), and the eci.ini. I made a script that will
> generate the eci.ini using the inigen program supplied by IBM.
> 
> So I was writing code, the speech kept dropping off before it finished.
> I thought I was doing something wrong, or that the timing of the VV
> eciSynchronize method was off. This method is supposed to return when
> the synthesis is done. I kept running the same code with varying
> results, sometimes it would speak the whole sentence, sometimes it
> would drop the last word or two. Then I remembered I had my system
> set up to switch TTS versions. I switched from TTS 5.1 to Outloud 5.1
> and the same things happened. Then I switched to Outloud-5.0 and
> suddenly the synchronization problem is fixed! Using the oldest of
> the three (ViaVoice_Outloud_rtk-5.0.1.0) corrected my problem. So if
> your viavoice is dropping words, try this older rev.
> 
> It may seem crazy to write code for an old unsupported product, but
> it sounds so much better than festival. I'm going to test out all the
> outloud API calls then decide what to do from there. One option might
> be to try adapting the that software synth middleware program to work
> with viavoice. Another might be to write my own voice server. And if
> viavoice doesn't work I'm going to shell out the $50 for dectalk.
> 
>    -- Doug
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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