[Kde-accessibility] punctuation or other improvments?

[Jonathan Duddington]

On 26 Oct, Gary Kline <kline at tao2.thought.org> wrote:

> 	Some of the default pronunciation by the Fevtival speakers
> 	leaves a lot to be desired.  The word "essay", for example.  
> 	Or the slight slurring of "to" when compared to one of its
> 	homonyms, "two" or "2" ...  .  

I tried the sentence "to essay to" with the "American Male -
(kal_diphone)" voice.  The are definitely problems.

The word "to" should have three different pronunciations (at least in
my own speech).  An emphatic form, phonetic [tu:], which is the same
sound as number "two".  This is used at the end of a sentence or when
the word is spoken alone.  There are a weak forms when [tU] (the same
vowel as in "foot") when the next word starts with a vowel, and [t@]
(the neutral schwa vowel, as in "the") when the next word starts with a
consonant.  Your own local version of English may differ.

Festival seems to use the schwa vowel in all cases, even when it's
spoken as a single word.  That's definitely wrong.

Festival is OK with "his essay", but in "the essay" or "to essay" it
seems to drop the initial "e", or perhaps merges it with the previous
word.  

> 	I'm running FreeBSD 6.2 and whatever its the latest KDE port of 
> 	its text-to-speech suite.  Can anybody point me to any fixes or
> 	improvements in the pronunciation/enunciation side of things?

Yes of course, eSpeak at:
http://espeak.sourceforge.net/

It's intonation is less annoying and the enunciation is clearer. 
If you don't like its mechanical voice, you can use eSpeak as a front
end to a more natural mbrola diphone voice. Details are at
http://espeak.sourceforge.net/mbrola.html