Re: Still no speech

[Adam Myrow <amyrow midsouth rr com>]

Well, here's the very latest.  I sort of have Gnopernicus working.  I
rebuilt Festival to use ESD figuring that since Gnome used it, maybe that
would work.  Since ESD does mixing of sounds to let even a single-channel
sound card act like a multiple-channel card, the results were interesting
to say the least!  Running Festival from the command line was no problem,
but when I ran the test-speech program, it would say several words all at
the same time!  When I tried this with Gnopernicus, I would get choppy
speech with some words skipped and others spoken all at once.  It would
eventually go back to silence.  When I logged out of Gnome, the ESD
process plus several Gnome processes would be hung requiring me to start
killing them.  Once I killed the hung festival-server processes, sometimes
I'd get a stream of speech like it had all built up.  Feeling desperate, I
decided to see how the Dectalk driver performed.  I shelled out the bucks
and installed it.  Well, of course, I had to rebuild gnome-speech, but
once that was done, most of the tests of the Dectalk driver seemed to
work.  The two exceptions were that the last voice sounded like the
previous one, and more importantly, the "call-back" test made the Dectalk
say "command error in string value.  This is test text.  Command error in
string value."  It then hangs until I hit control-C.  If I try to start
Gnopernicus now with the Dectalk driver, I get "command error in string
value.  Welcome to Gnopernicus.  Command error in string value."  Then,
silence.  Looking at my running processes shows several processes for the
Dectalk running.  It then occurred to me that I'd just seen something about
this with Viavoice.  The message said that Viavoice and Alsa don't get
along too well. I am using Alsa.  I'm wondering if that could be my
problem?  Does anybody who is using Alsa have Gnopernicus working?  If so,
what sound card are you using and what version of Alsa?  I'd like to find
this out before trying anything else.  By the way, this software Dectalk
doesn't quite sound like the Dectalk voiice we all know.  The inflection
seems about right, but there is just something different.  At least it
doesn't have that raspy quality of the Dectalk Access 32 software for
Windows.  This sounds more like the old Text Assist that used to ship with
Sound Blaster cards.