Making flite more responsive and improving its pronounciation

[Kenny Hitt]

Hi.

I came up with those parms by reading the DECtalk manual and
experimenting.  They will work for Paul and Betty, but make other voices
sound really bad.  As usual for me, I didn't document my final result.
also, I just realized I pasted the parms from my weather script instead
of my dtk-generic.conf file.

The [:dv ap 130] and the [:ra 350] set pitch and rate to hard coded
values.  You don't want those for speech-dispatcher.

The 2 parms that are important are:

[:dv ri 90 sm 0][:pe -380]

The [:pe -380] option sets the "period pause" to the shortest value.
Basically, it makes the synth pause as little as possible between
sentences or lists where items end with a period.
The speakup driver for the DECtalk express also uses this value.

I went back and looked at the docs again, and realized it will probably
be easier for you to read them about the [:dv ri 90 sm 0] options.  They
change basic values of the voice.  The doc explains it better than I
could.  For the paul and betty voices, it makes them mumble less.
I downloaded the docs from the Fonix web site.  They are pdf files.

Your pitch problem is probably because the default pitch when speakup
starts with a software synth is 5.  I've found DECtalk software sounds
best at a pitch of 2 or 3. Flite and festival seem to sound good at
pitch 5, just not the DECtalk.

On Wed, Mar 23, 2005 at 01:23:26PM -0700, Steve Holmes wrote:
> Can you explain these parms a bit? Curious minds want to know.  How
> did you come by the particular numeric values you did?
> 
> One other observation I'm noticing with DECtalk; When
> speech-dispatcher first says "Software synth found," the DEC is at
> something like Double pitch or some such.  I have to set a lower pitch
> to get the voice to sound right for the rest of the session.  I'm
> running Slackware 10.1 with the default compiler gcc 3.3.4.  This
> sounds like a problem reported back with earlier versions of Redhat if
> I recall.  Any ideas about the high pitch deal?
> 
> Thanks.
>