Inflection in speech synthesis

[Hynek Hanke]

Justin Ekis writes 06. 06. 2006 v 22:21 -0400: 
> I have /etc/festival.scm but not festival.conf. Is that the file to use?

Yes, sorry for the mistake. /etc/festival.scm is correct.

> Unfortunately the example you sent isn't working here, I may be doing 
> something wrong though.
> > (set-pitch-range 200)
> SIOD ERROR: unbound variable : set-pitch-range

I forgot to notice this function comes from the festival-freebsoft-utils
extension package. In Debian, this is the package name, otherwise you
can get it here:
http://www.freebsoft.org/festival-freebsoft-utils

It is a package providing some of the functionality needed for Speech
Dispatcher through the Festival extensions mechanism. It is also a
package providing a consistent and hopefully friendlier interface to
festival and some of its parameter settings. I've found HTML
documentation is not available from the project pages, so I've
temporarily placed it on
	http://www.freebsoft.org/~hanke/festival-freebsoft-utils/
until we fix it (which should happen in a few days).

> Where can I find clear documentation on festival? I've installed the 
> festival-doc package in debian and looked through the manual which 
> starts at /usr/share/doc/festival/html/festival_toc.html.

Yes, user documentation is also one of the things which is needed.

> It seems very complicated and I get the idea I'll have to learn the 
> scheme language just to customize my tts. That's not very appealing.

For simple options, like (set-pitch-range 200), Scheme offers a simple
syntax. But the great advantage of having the configuration file in
syntax of a scriptable language is that you can do more complicated
things if you like, load your own extensions etc. You are not limited by
a set of linear configuration options provided by the author.

Also, the KDE and Ubuntu developers expressed their wish to work on
a configuration tool for accessibility tools, including Festival.

> By the way, any idea when festival 2.0 will be out? It's coming up on 
> two years since 1.95 beta was released and nothing new. There's not even 
> an experimental debian package for it that I can find.

I don't know. But please be aware that much of the developement on Festival
is happening through independent extension packages like festival-freebsoft-utils,
festival-czech, festival-italian etc.

With regards,
Hynek Hanke