[Kde-accessibility] punctuation or other improvments?

[Gary Kline]

On Sat, 2007-10-27 at 03:49 +0100, Jonathan Duddington wrote:
> 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
> 

	Thanks for  the URL's.  Do you know if these just install in
/usr/local/* and are understood automatically?  or if I need to do some
by-hand configuration?

	Re "essay" and many other words (and punctuation), I started to
create my own filter(s).  After I signed up to list list I discovered
there are more phonic dictionaries that I'd hoped for.   The thing is:
do I want to make my own fixes or get the latest files?  A lot of the
stuff I'm working with is my own writing and others and deals with
things not that commonly discussed. 

Do you know if there is one central place that has the newest voices, or
is it pretty much look and see?

thanks again,

gary

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-- 
Gary Kline     
kline at ethos.thought.org         
www.thought.org       
Thought Unlimited