Re: Still no speech

[Bill Haneman <bill haneman sun com>]

Adam:

You may be interested to know that I saw a bugfix to the DecTalk driver
for gnome-speech from Marc today, to the callbacks code.  I don't know
whether that would impact your results or not.

As Rich said already on this list, the DECTalk driver is very new and I
would expect a number of bugfixes soon as it stabilizes.  With respect
to your reports from using Festival with ALSA, more detailed reports may
be useful to us (for instance, we'd be interested in knowing the
"several GNOME processes" which appeared to be hung.)

In short, these drivers are performing well within our small group, but
on this list they are getting exposed to a much more heterogeneous
environment all around, with a mixture of configuration differences,
errors, different OS and GNOME versions, etc.  So your input is
important and valuable to us - but I hope that everyone realizes the
heterogeneity of the environments being discussed on the list, and the
fact that these drivers are currently in active development.

best regards,

- Bill

On Mon, 2003-05-19 at 22:49, Adam Myrow wrote:
> 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.
> 
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