Making speech synthesisers speak a particular way

[Michael Whapples]

Hello,
So as I am understanding this, it might be best to use SSML, and work
directly with a particular synths api (eg. use the espeak shared
library) to make things cross platform (as we have no cross platform
common access system like speech-dispatcher is on Linux). As I know
people don't always like the sound of espeak, I could output the text
with SSML to a file so that it could be used by another synth (I think I
might have seen comments in festival about it supporting SSML), but I
might not guarantee it works (eg. if the Microsoft sapi standard varies
slightly then it might not speak as I really want it to).

Thanks for the help.

From
Michael Whapples
On Wed, 2008-01-02 at 21:39 -0500, David Poehlman wrote:
> know if it works with apple?
> 
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Jonathan Duddington" <jsd at clara.co.uk>
> To: <speakup at braille.uwo.ca>
> Sent: Wednesday, January 02, 2008 11:44 AM
> Subject: Re: Making speech synthesisers speak a particular way
> 
> 
> 
> On 02 Jan, Michael Whapples <mwhapples at aim.com> wrote:
> 
> > I am looking at adding speech output to a program I am writing, and
> > am wondering about the best way to achieve the style of speech (eg.
> > pauses in the correct places, correct punctuation level spoken, etc)
> > for this. I know of (heard of, but don't know much about) things like
> > SSML, would this be what I need to look at?
> 
> Yes, SSML will give a better chance of using different synthesizers.
> See:  http://www.w3.org/TR/speech-synthesis
> 
> eSpeak supports many of the SSML tags.
> Although others such as <prosody contour=> make no sense to me.
> 
> The recently released eSpeak version 1.30 has improvements to its
> implementation of <break> and <emphasis> tags.
> 
> <emphasis> is useful to put the emphasis on other than the final word
> of a sentence.
> 
> <break time=""> was broken in eSpeak 1.30 but fixed now in 1.30.01.
> 
> I don't know whether you can use SSML through SAPI5.  It seems that, as
> usual, Microsoft has its own, non-standard standard.
> 
> 
> 
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