Re: Software Speech (Re: ibm tts run-time engine purchasing alternatives)

["Robert D. Crawford" <rdc1x@comcast.net>]

"John G. Heim" <jheim@wisc.edu> writes:

>>as for the long pauses before the speech begins, yes, I was surprised
>>too.  the Festival synth works by emacspeak passing the whole
>>document, or at best a whole paragraph, off to the synth server and
>>then waiting for a sound file to be returned. The WAV is then queued
>>on the DSP device for playback.  Once playback begins, there is no
>>means to abort. The Java synth, mbrola and flite all work the same
>> way
>>(using the same code); I don't understand why they'd want to use a
>>system like that, and I do question if anyone really seriously does
>>use it.

I can't speak for anything else, but I do know that when I was using
flite under emacspeak I would regularly read long buffers with C-e n and
when I had to interrupt the speech,  I did not have a problem.  I do
seem to remember having this sort of problem, but it was about 8 months
ago and I think I was trying speech dispatcher. 

> I know flight works fairly well with emacspeak. Although I've never
> installed it, I have used it quite a bit. 

I can second this.  In the short amount of time I have been using the
via voice tts, I have found that the only advantage it has over flite is
the multiple voice support.  If you are a developer it is definitely
worth it.  I never really had a problem with the voice quality, and as a
mater of fact, it did take me a bit of time to get used to the difference in voices
between the two.  I did have one other problem that I have not seen
mentioned and that is the speed up in the output during heavy scrolling
and when passing over urls.  I eventually got used to it.

> You're thinking, "How is that possible?" I have used flight and oralux
> quite a bit.  

Sometime in the future, there will be a version of Oralux available with
the viavoice tts engine.  Boot it and test it out without the pain of
installation... should be pretty cool.

rdc

-- 
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Robert D. Crawford                                      rdc1x@comcast.net

You have an unusual equipment for success.  Be sure to use it properly.
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