[gnuspeech-contact] Newbie requests mind-tuning

[Ken Beesley]

Mind-tuning:  Using gnuspeech now for a new language?

I just discovered gnuspeech and am reading the available
documentation.  I have a medium- to long-term goal
of creating a text-to-speech system for the Hopi language.
I had assumed that I would create a diphone or unit-
selection voice using a framework like Festival/Festvox,
but now I'm wondering if it might be possible or even
desirable to use gnuspeech in some way.

One problem in the audio recording of Hopi subjects (to
build a database for a diphone or unit-selection voice) would
be that few of them are acquainted with the orthography.
One possibility would be to present the prompts as
audio, perhaps generated by a program like gnuspeech.
Of course, a gnuspeech voice for Hopi could be very interesting
by itself.

My background:  computational linguist, some background
in phonetics/phonology/IPA, specialist in finite-state
morphological analysis and generation.  Competence in
Unicode, orthographies, input methods, XML.  Programming
in Perl, Python, Java, C.  Using Mac Tibook running OS X 10.3.9.
But I'm just getting into text-to-speech as a private interest.


Hopi Language Background:

1.  There is a de facto standard or first-priority dialect now,
"Third Mesa Hopi", as documented in the excellent
"Hopi Dictionary/Hopìikwa Lavàytutuveni", 1997.

2.  The phonology and orthography are well defined.  I can map
reliably from orthographical text to phoneme strings, including
word stress and a falling-tone phonomenon, using a Python script;
no auxiliary pronunciation dictionary is required.

3.  Phonetic details including allophonic variants, vowel lengths,
and the realization of the falling-tone phonomenon are still to
be investigated.  Rhythm and intonation still need to be
investigated.

Big Question:  Is the gnuspeech project currently at a state where I
could reasonably use it to create a text-to-speech system for
Hopi?   Or should I concentrate on Festival/Festvox?

Thanks,

Ken