eSpeak - Introduction

[Willem van der Walt]

Hi Jonathan
Thanks for a much needed useful free software synthesizer.
The clarity and accuracy of the speech is quite good.  I am interested in 
the process of creating a new language using espeak.
Where can I get more detail on that?
I think there is a bug in the espeak program when reading long text files. 
To me it is no problem as I am using speech-dispatcher which sends smaller 
chunks of text at a time, but others might be using the file feature.
The program segfaults after a time.
Thanks again for a great program.
Regards, Willem


On Thu, 13 Apr 2006, Jonathan Duddington wrote:

> I've just found this mailing list from a comment on the
> espeak.sourceforge.net forum.  It's good to see people using (or trying
> to use) eSpeak.
>
> eSpeak is not new, I originally wrote it about 10 years ago for the
> Acorn/RISC OS platform.  The Linux version is a re-write of the code
> which I've been doing over the past few months.  I'm definitely not an
> expert on Linux system programming or system administration, so I'll
> probably need to ask for help in those areas if the need arises.
>
> eSpeak uses the "sinusoidal" technique of synthesis.  Basically it
> makes vowels and sonorant consonants, eg. [r,l,m,n,w] by adding
> together the sine waves of harmonics in varying proportions.
>
> Unvoiced consonants such as [h,t,s,f,k] are simply recorded sound
> samples, while voiced consonants eg [v,z,d,g] are a mixture of these
> two methods.
>
> It should be interesting to see what are the specific needs of a TTS
> engine for use with speakup, and how eSpeak can be improved to give a
> better match to them.
>
> I've been using eSpeak on Linux mostly with the KDE TTS system (KTTS).
> I don't know anything about speakup or speech-despatcher yet, other
> than a quick look at the speakup user guide.
>
> A problem has been reported with eSpeak, where it locks up when it
> finds the sound device is already in use.  I've made a fix for this for
> the next release, which I'll probably make in a few days.  Perhaps
> there are some other changes that will be useful too.  Let me know :-)
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup at braille.uwo.ca
> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
>

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