Re: software synthesiser for emacspeak

[Tim X]

Adams <pawlaczus@yahoo.com> writes:

> Hello
> I'm trying to choose the software synthesiser for emacspeak.
> I would like it to have the following features:
> 1. Sound clear
> 2. Easy to install and upgrade
>
> I have the following synthesisers installed on my system:
> 1. festival with mbrola support
> 2. flite
> 3. eflite
>
> Festival sounds best for me, eflite the worst, flite is quite good.
> Unfortunately I couldn't find the clear documentation on how to launch
> them with emacspeak.
> Could You indicate some good docs of how to do that ?
>
> Thanks in advance
>

Of the free software synthesises available for emacspeak, I think the two
most popular are eflite and espeak. I'm surprised you find a difference
between eflite and flite - eflite is really just a wrapper to provide an
interface to flite - they both use the same synthesizer engine 'under the
hood'. 

I've not tried espeak, but those that have have said they find it clear and
very responsive. There are/were some patches around for festival, but I
don't think anyone uses it because it can be a bit 'sluggish' (flite is a
stripped down version of festival that is more responsive and less of a
resource hog). Festival is great if you want to experiment with voice
synthesis, but less useful in an actual production system. 

Emacspeak also supports two commercial software synthesises, IBM's ViaVoice
and Fonix's software dectalk. both provide great quality speech and are
very responsive, but the software dectalk has some stability issues under
emacspeak and ViaVoice can be expensive to purchase (Though I believe you
can now get cheap runtime licenses for IBM ViaVoice - see the emacspeak
mail archive). 

My recommendation would be to start with espeak and eflite. You can find
some information in the Makefile on running and testing the speech
servers. You need to compile the servers as well and I'd suggest having
extended Tcl 8.3 rather than 8.4 as 8.4 doesn't come with the executable
tclx shell. Note that there is Tcl and extended Tcl and that they are
different. You need extended Tcl. also note that different linux
distributions handle these packages and what they are called slightly
differently. 

HTH

Tim