eSpeak - Introduction

[Kirk Reiser]

Jonathan Duddington <jsd at clara.co.uk> writes:

> 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.

Oops!  Forsome reason the document containing the DoubleTalk command
set and a lot of other data was not in that directory.  I have now
placed it there called DoubleTalk-rc8650.txt.  There is a complete
section on the dtlk's command set.

> 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.

Typically a command within the text stream starts with a control-a is
followed by one or two character parametre and a single command letter
such as 'S' for speed.  The parametres are usually a number between
0-9 or + and - for relative movement.  So for example ctrl-a8S would
give a fairly fast speech rate.

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

That's why I recommended looking at the dtlk command set.  It is
complete yet concise which say the DECTalk command set is not.

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

Currently speakup has a software synth output module which uses a
subset of the dtlk command set and can be accessed directly by opening
a device /dev/softsyn or can be accessed through the speech dispatcher
system with a stub program speechd-up which opens the device and feeds
output to speech dispatcher.

> 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.

You can use either method some folks are happy with a pitch shift
while others prefer a totally different voice and yet others prefer
tones or words like 'cap ', so it's an individual choice thing.

The basic set of commands you would want would be rate 'S', pitch 'P',
number and punctuation handling 'B', voice 'O' and maybe volume 'V'.
A switch to handle language change and a number of other options would
be useful as well.

  Kirk

-- 

Kirk Reiser				The Computer Braille Facility
e-mail: kirk at braille.uwo.ca		University of Western Ontario
phone: (519) 661-3061