eSpeak - Introduction

[Jonathan Duddington]

In article <x71ww13hg0.fsf at speech.braille.uwo.ca>,
   Kirk Reiser <kirk at braille.uwo.ca> wrote:

> If you are interested in extending it's capabilities to some degree,
> inline control parametres for the common adjustable settings would be
> nice.  Being able to modify speed, pitch, intonation and the like is
> very useful for producing features such as pitch change on capital
> letters for example.  The doubletalk hardware synthesizer from RC
> Systems has a nice and concise command language set you may want to
> look at as an example.

Yes, I think embedded control commands within the text stream would be
a useful addition.  This should be possible with some work.

I'm not sure exactly which document you meant. I looked at
"DoubleTalk-developers.txt" which has a section "Interrogating
DoubleTalk" which mentions various parameters (including tone,
articulation, expression, punc level) but doesn't define them.  I
didn't find a section on setting parameters from within the text stream.

Perhaps better would be if you could start by specifying exactly what
you would like ideally.  What parameters, and the syntax of how they
could be specified within the text.

Should they be based on some established speech mark-up language?  I'm
not familiar with that topic.

Would you need to write a speakup module specific to eSpeak rather than
using a generic one?

Is the pitch variation meant to be the same voice adjusting his pitch,
or does a different pitch imply different voice characteristics;
eSpeak's "female" voice is a variation on the standard male voice but
it needed adjustments to the formant frequencies as well as the pitch
to sound anything like reasonable.