[Kde-accessibility] [Announce] Revisions to KDE Text-to-Speech
System (KTTS)
Paul Giannaros
ceruleanblaze at gmail.com
Mon Nov 15 14:15:55 CET 2004
I'm guessings it's just start up time. Once tts systems that read text
from STDIN (Festival Int) are inited then they should be alrite.
On Mon, 15 Nov 2004 11:56:32 +0000, Bill Haneman <bill.haneman at sun.com> wrote:
> The lack of stretch parameters is a serious issue for blind users, who
> typically care a lot about bandwidth and may wish to use quite high TTS
> rates. Is there an alternative method of speeding up the MultiSyn
> voices?
>
> Bill
>
>
>
>
> On Sat, 2004-11-13 at 05:13, Gary Cramblitt wrote:
> > A number of changes have been committed to CVS for KTTSD and the KDE
> > Text-to-Speech system. Chief among them is support for Festival 2.0 and
> > MultiSyn voices.
> >
> > If you have not tried Festival 2.0 (currently 1.95 beta) and the new MultiSyn
> > voices, you are in for a treat. The voices are very natural sounding,
> > sometimes indistinguishable from a human voice. Congrats to the Festival
> > team for a job very well done indeed.
> >
> > In addition, Festival is now free for any purpose, commercial or
> > non-commercial alike. See Festival website for details.
> >
> > That's the good news. Now the bad news. The MultiSyn voices are huge and
> > typically require 5 to 15 seconds to load. Furthermore, if the MultiSyn
> > voices are the only voices you have installed, you pay this penalty each time
> > Festival is started. To deal with this, KTTS now offers the option to start
> > Festival and load voices when KTTSD is started, rather than waiting until the
> > first use of the synth.
> >
> > Synthesis of sentences also takes slightly longer than for other voices.
> > Because KTTSD endeavors to keep the synth busy while simultaneously playing
> > already synth'ed sentences, this is not too bad, but does cause a noticeable
> > delay for the first sentence.
> >
> > The datadir parameter is no longer supported in Festival 2.0, and the MultiSyn
> > voices are not expected to be in the voices/ directory. Instead, they are in
> > the voices-multisyn/ directory, while the old voices remain in the voices/
> > directory. Accordingly, the Festival Interactive configuration dialog no
> > longer asks for the path to the voices directory. Instead, it asks for the
> > path to the Festival executable, and queries Festival itself for the
> > available voice files. As a side benefit, this permits you to install both
> > the old and new Festival and configure one or more Talkers for each one.
> > Because the query can take a long time (up to 15 seconds, but usually 5 to 6
> > seconds), a Cancel button is offered for users who wish not to wait. (Tip:
> > If you want to avoid long query times, install one of the diphone voices in
> > addition to the MultiSyn voices, such as kal_diphone.)
> >
> > At present, only two MultiSyn voices are available -- Canadian English and
> > Scottish English -- but IMHO, this new technology is so impressive that
> > additional languages are sure to come soon.
> >
> > The MultiSyn voices seem to ignore the Duration_Stretch parameter, so for
> > these voices, the Speed settings in the Festival Interactive configuration
> > dialog are disabled.
> >
> > Several other enhancements and bug fixes have been made. See the ChangeLog
> > below.
> >
> > KTTS is currently available in KDE CVS, kdenonbeta module, directory kttsd.
> > See
> >
> > http://developer.kde.org/source/anoncvs.html
> >
> > Nightly tarballs of the kdenonbeta module (large) are available at
> >
> > ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/unstable/latest/kdenonbeta.tar.bz2
> >
> > Festival 1.95beta is available at
> >
> > http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/download.html
> >
> > If the Talker configuration dialogs seem to be misbehaving for you, please do
> > the following:
> >
> > 1. Exit KTTSMgr and killall kttsd.
> > 2. Run clean_obsolete.sh in the kttsd root directory.
> > 3. Reinstall KTTS, i.e., make install.
> > 4. Delete $HOME/.kde/share/config/kttsdrc
> > 5. Start KTTSMgr and reconfigure your Talkers. Be sure to click Apply!
> >
> > Since these changes required code changes throughout KTTS, I'm sure there are
> > a few bugs lurking. Feedback is appreciated.
> >
> > ChangeLog
> > ---------------
> >
> > 2004-11-11 Gary Cramblitt (PhantomsDad) <garycramblitt at comcast.net>
> > * Support for Festival 2.0. and Festival MultiSyn voices in
> > FestivalInt plugin.
> > * Query Festival for available voices, rather than scanning for
> > directories.
> > * Support for multiple versions of Festival executable. Now asks for
> > EXE path rather
> > than voices path.
> > * Allow preload of Festival voices that take a long time to load.
> > If set, Festival is started when KTTSD starts and the voice is
> > loaded.
> > * When stopText() is called and FestivalInt plugin is synthing (not
> > saying) using
> > a pre-loaded voice, instead of killing Festival, which would cost
> > hugely in
> > re-startup time, Festival is allowed to finish synthing and result
> > is discarded.
> > This improves performance when rewinding/fastforwarding.
> > * Corrected FestivalInt voices file as to voice descriptions and
> > languages.
> > Added MultiSyn voices.
> > * Added accelerators and WhatsThis help to FestivalInt, Command, Epos,
> > Flite, and Hadifix
> > configuration dialogs.
> > * Added modal, cancelable, progress dialog while Testing in
> > FestivalInt, Command, Epos,
> > Flite, FreeTTS, and Hadifix configuration dialogs.
> > This prevents a crash when user clicks OK or Cancel before test has
> > completed.
> > * Command plugin always displays configuration dialog when added,
> > i.e., never
> > autoconfigs.
> > * Speed adjustment disabled when using MultiSyn Festival voices.
> > * Allow KTTSMgr screen to be resized to minimum size. Allow splitter
> > to resize jobs
> > ListView to minimum vertical size.
> > * No longer attempt to build Festival plugin (static linking to
> > Festival/Speech Tools
> > libaries). User must explicitly request via ./configure
> > --enable-kttsd-festival.
> > Code is woefully behind, I cannot get it to work, and probably
> > wouldn't work
> > anymore even if I could get it to link and get past crash on first
> > call to library.
> > FestivalInt seems to work just fine..grc.
> >
> > 2004-11-10 Paul Giannaros (Cerulean)
> > * getTalkerCodes() returning corrupted talker codes.
> >
> > --
> > Gary Cramblitt (aka PhantomsDad)
> > KDE Text-to-Speech Maintainer
> > http://accessibility.kde.org/developer/kttsd/index.php
> > _______________________________________________
> > kde-accessibility mailing list
> > kde-accessibility at kde.org
> > https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-accessibility
>
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