[Kde-accessibility] Another speech engine for KTTS?

[Olaf Jan Schmidt]

Hi Jonathan!

Thanks for contacting us about the new speech engine. My sound card is 
currently broken, but I will test it as soon as I have fixed it again.

You say that the support for German is just prove-of-concept, but we currently 
don't have a free (as in speech) speech engine for German, so it is 
definitely useful to have a look at it. I can bring you in contact with Klaus 
Knopper, who plans to work on a free software solution for German speech 
synthesis.

> If you think the engine is useful, I'll make the source code available
> under GPL.

Yes, having it available under the GPL would help a lot. This would make it 
easier to give it to more people for testing if you are interested.

On February 25/26, we will do a usability testing of KDE Accessibility in 
German. Having the source beforehand would be great.

> Thanks for the information.
> Producing a WAV output file with a -w argument should be simple enough.

Great!

> BTW I've just noticed that it's not recognising accented characters in
> German.  Perhaps a signed/unsigned character problem.  I'll try and fix
> that too (not that the German should be taken seriously though).

Sound like an encoding issue. Can your speech engine accept UTF-8 input? This 
would really be useful, especially for languages with a non-Latin alphabet. 
Festival has problems in this regard as well.

Olaf

-- 
Olaf Jan Schmidt, KDE Accessibility co-maintainer, open standards 
accessibility networker, Protestant theology student and webmaster of 
http://accessibility.kde.org/ and http://www.amen-online.de/