[Kde-accessibility] punctuation or other improvments?

[Jonathan Duddington]

On 28 Oct, Gary Kline <kline at ethos.thought.org> wrote:

> 	Then perhaps you can tell me the relationship between Alan Black's
> "Festival" and "espeak";

There is none.  
eSpeak is a different open-source text to speech synthesizer.  It uses
a different method, "formant synthesis".  This makes it faster (more
responsive) and much smaller (which allows several languages in a small
package), but less natural in speech quality.  However I believe its
enunciation is clearer, which was your main problem.

> there is a suite of three speech utilities named "*mbrola" that have
> not up updated on my version of BSD for two years.   I would like to
> use the leading synthsizer--the one most actively being developed.  

The mbrola diphone voices are only the back-end part of a synthesizer. 
They need a front-end to do spelling to phoneme conversion and
intonation.  eSpeak can be used for this and may be useful to avoid the
Festival errors which you mentioned, while avoiding the mechanical
sound of eSpeak's own formant synthesis.  

Basically I'm suggesting that you try alternatives to find which sounds
best for you.  Different people have different preferences.

> I'll send you some words, off-list.

Thanks.  It's easy enough for me to find words which are pronounced
wrongly, by speaking a lexicon.  But many are uncommon words, or are
only slightly wrong, or both.  Many may not be a problem in practice. 
But if you find errors which are annoying or confusing, then please
tell me.