Making flite more responsive and improving its pronounciation

[Sean McMahon]

I think the first part of my subject was well answered last week: "making flite
more responsive", now how can I improve it's pronunciation?
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Kenny Hitt" <kenny at hittsjunk.net>
To: "Speakup is a screen review system for Linux." <speakup at braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Wednesday, March 30, 2005 9:03 AM
Subject: Re: Making flite more responsive and improving its pronounciation


> 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.
> >
>
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