Problems with Software Speech

[Michael Whapples]

The reason for the wave file being generated was for two reasons.
Firstly by using aplay I found better compatability with my sound cards,
some were taking a long time to start the speech when letting espeak use
portaudio for output. Secondly portaudio v18 didn't support alsa, and
while portaudio v19 can use alsa, at the time not all distros, and see
first comment as portaudio v19 seemed just as bad or possibly worse when
using the alsa driver, so as other speech-dispatcher generic modules use
creating a temp wave file I decided to go with that (for me the results
weren't bad, still much better than flite or festival for
responsiveness).

Further to the above, some users of orca have found stuttering with the
gnome-speech espeak driver (which produces audio through portaudio), but
found by using the speech-dispatcher module (when creating a wave file)
the stuttering went away.

Admittedly it probably isn't the most efficient way to create speech,
but it seems the most reliable to me, but if you find you don't need
this then why not customise it for yourself. 

From
Michael Whapples
On Tue, 2007-06-19 at 11:16 -0400, ace wrote:
> Greg,
> 
> That was indeed the problem.  I carried out your steps and it works.  I 
> still don't think that software speech under Linux is all that impressive. 
> According to my experiences, it is somewhat slow and often dies completely 
> if a lot of text is sent to it too quickly.  Could be just my hardware but 
> others have had similar experiences.
> 
> In the espeak-generic.conf file, should I have left it creating wav files in 
> the command line parameter?  I took that out so that text was sent to the 
> espeak application directly; seems to me that making wav files would just 
> slow the process down even more.
> 
> Thanks,
> Robby
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Gregory Nowak" <greg at romuald.net.eu.org>
> To: "Speakup is a screen review system for Linux." <speakup at braille.uwo.ca>
> Sent: Monday, June 18, 2007 3:28 PM
> Subject: Re: Problems with Software Speech
> 
> 
> 
> > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> > Hash: SHA1
> >
> > It seems you may be running into a similar problem which I reported
> > happens when switching synths with the doubletalk pc driver built into
> > the kernel, and set as the default. Try starting the system with none
> > as the default synth, and then loading software speech, starting with
> > the sftsyn module. If that works like it's supposed to, then it looks
> > like the ltlk driver has issues as well.
> >
> > Greg
> >
> >
> > On Mon, Jun 18, 2007 at 03:21:19PM -0400, ace wrote:
> >> Hi all
> >>
> >> I just spent the last two weeks building a LFS system then installing
> >> necessary packages from the BLFS book.  Now, I am to the point of 
> >> installing
> >> software speech.  Speech-Dispatcher is installed, as is Speechd-Up. 
> >> Espeak
> >> is my synth of choice.  I also setup my kernel to compile sftsyn as a
> >> module.  In the default synth field in the kernel, though, I have ltlk as
> >> that is my primary synth.  I have verified that Speech-Dispatcher and
> >> Speechd-up are working because I performed the speechd-up probe test and 
> >> it
> >> was spoken.  The problem happens when I do modprobe speakup_sftsyn.  The
> >> system simply freezes; no speech, no beeps, nothing.  In fact, I'm forced 
> >> to
> >> restart forcefully with the ower button.  Where should I look to find
> >> whatever error may be occurring?  If I need to get sighted assistance,
> >> that's not a problem.
> >>
> >> Thanks,
> >> Robby
> >>
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> Speakup mailing list
> >> Speakup at braille.uwo.ca
> >> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
> >
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