[Kde-accessibility] Nice KTTS, but without TTS.

[Gary Cramblitt]

On Friday 06 August 2004 10:46 am, Robert Vogl wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> the subject may be provoking, but it is based on my experience with two
> popular TTS systems under Linux. One is MBrola, the other Festival.
>
> Both are NOT part of SuSE Linux, one of the most popular distributions. I
> dont't know how the situation is with other distributions Fedorea, Debian
> or whatever. Sure, we have the option to get MBrola or Festival from the
> internet. But the installation of these packages, even to know which
> packages you will need, is really a mess and in case of Festival impossible
> if you want to keep your system consitent (caused by an infinite chain of
> dependencies of "strstream.h"). Moreover, the typical end-user will see no
> reason why he (or she) should have to install a developer environment,
> learning C and Scheme, just to get his computer speaking.
>
> What I would like to express is that we will have a nice TTS framework for
> KDE in the near future but nobody, except skilled computer scientists,
> would benefit from it, i.e. it is simply a useless toy.
>
> I think the  Accessibility-Group should start activities to encourage the
> authors of various TTS systems and/or the Distribution maintainers to
> provide the end-user with easy-to-install packages (and easy to configure,
> of course!). How did the Gnome people solved that problem?

Thanks for the comments.  I agree with your goal.  A couple of observations.

It is not necessary to compile festival.  A binary install is all that is 
needed.  "make" on KTTSD should automatically detect that the festival 
libraries are not installed and skip building the festival plugin, but it 
should detect the festival binary and build the festivalint (festival 
interactive) plugin.  If that is not happening, let me know.  The festivalint 
plugin runs the festival binary as a subprocess, so access to festival source 
or libraries is not required; that is why I wrote festivalint. :)

SUSE RPMs for festival ought to be available, given that RedHat RPMs are 
available.  If not, someone with a SUSE system and experience building RPMs 
needs to build it and make it available.  (AFAIK, RedHat RPMs work fine.)  
"gg:rpmfind festival" in Konqueror shows that RPMs are available for 
Mandrake, RedHat, Fedora, ASPLinux, YellowDog, and others, but not SUSE.  
(I'm running Debian, BTW, so I can't help with getting festival installed in 
SUSE.)

(A couple of months ago, there was a problem with the make files that come 
with festival.  It was impossible to build festival with "srcdir <> insdir".  
I don't know if that's been addressed, but I agree, users shouldn't have to 
compile festival or deal with these issues.)

OTH, KDE does not distribute binaries, nor does KDE generally redistribute 
source for external packages.  That's left to packagers to deal with.

So, bottom line is it will be up to developers to build binaries (packages) 
for the various distros, not only of mbrola, txt2pho, flite, and festival, 
but of KTTSD as well.  There is much work to be done.

BTW, there is another synth available called ethos (sp?) which I plan to try 
to support soon.

It seems to me that the larger issue is language support.  Festival seems to 
support the largest number of languages, followed by mbrola, but that isn't 
saying much.  Last I saw, mbrola only supports German and English.  So effort 
will be needed to either enhance these existing synthesis engines, or someone 
will have to step up to the plate and develop another synth for KDE.  That's 
a massive effort, I think, so it probably won't happen anytime soon.

Once KTTSD is moved into a mainstream module, such as kdeaccessibility or 
kdeextragear-n, I expect more people will get involved using it.  I expect 
that to happen in the near future.  Hopefully, volunteers will then begin 
stepping up for binary packaging and additional language support for the 
synths.  Maybe once the potential is seen by the community, we'll even see 
some corporate backing, who knows.

-- 
Gary Cramblitt (aka PhantomsDad)
KDE Text-to-Speech Maintainer
http://accessibility.kde.org/developer/kttsd/index.php