[Kde-accessibility] [Announce] Revisions to KDE Text-to-Speech System (KTTS)

[Bill Haneman]

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
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