Flite and different voices (was: Re: speakup and cepstral?)

[Hynek Hanke]

On Thu, May 06, 2004 at 11:12:29AM -0700, Steve Holmes wrote:
> This isn't quite related to Cepstral but I would like to get Speech
> Dispatcher to use a different voice inside of flite.  

Hi Steve,

please try to allways post different things under different subjects.
You then have a higher chance that I (or someone other) will response
early because it's nicely organized in our email archives and we know what
we are talking about. It's distracting to read in the email about things
unrelated to the subject and trying to remember what we are talking about.
I tend to remember mailing list threads by subject. Also, it's easier to
search for the history of a given problem.


> I compiled flite with a default of the cmu-us-en-kal16 voice instead of the 8-bit
> version.  Frankly, it sounds much better.  When I test flite from the
> command line, it does indeed speak with this voice.  

This is a bit of problem with Flite, because in the module I have to call
different C functions for different voices. As I wasn't aware there are more
than one voice and it seemed there won't be any in near future, I hardcoded
here only the one that came with my distribution of Flite.

I'm interested in where can I get kal16 for Flite?

It seems I'll have to somehow make this configurable if there are more voices
for Flite now. As it is now, you have to edit the source code. If you want
to play around with it a little bit, it's src/modules/flite.c in you Speech
Dispatcher source directory, some line around l.95. Now it reads:
	flite_voice = register_cmu_us_kal();
and you would probably want to change it to
	flite_voice = register_cmu_us_kal_16();
or something like that. Then recompile and make install. I don't know
the exact function name, maybe you could ask the Festival guys about
it and write us back. This kind of help is always appreciated.

Best Regards,
Hynek Hanke
http://www.freebsoft.org