Re: FreeTTS very laggy after install.

[Luke Yelavich <lukethemuso ozemail com au>]

At 04:16 PM 23/11/2003, Jacob Schmude wrote:
> Hi
> Hmm, a slow freetts? That's not odd at all. You're in the same boat as I 
> am regarding freetts. I've got an AMD athlon, 2.13ghz here and freetts 
> takes at least
> two seconds to speak anything... that's why I use dectalk software 
> instead, costs a bit but works much better. My impression of freetts is 
> that it isn't very fast

I have DECtalk as well, but find that it locks up X a bit, especially when 
I try and use Mozilla. I wonder though whether that has to do with DECtalk, 
gnopernicus, gnome-speech, or even ALSA.

> in general. If you're looking for something free that works with 
> gnome-speech, try festival, it speaks much more quickly than freetts. 
> However, it doesn't shut
> up as fast and it doesn't support speech markers--no big deal, since as 
> far as I can tell gnopernicus doesn't even use speech markers yet.

I don't like the quality of the voices in Festival, and it is too clunky to 
set up :)

> The slackware 9.1 packages are of gnome-2.4 and, if you're OK with 
> removing your garnome installation or at least moving it out of your path, 
> I'd go ahead and install them.

I have actually updated garnome with patches, to try and prevent some of 
the locking up that has been happening. That was why I tried FreeTTS, to 
see if the locking up was attributed to DECtalk. So GNOME is basically 
2.4.1 at the moment, and I might stay with garnome anyway.

> It probably won't help with freetts, but it'll sure help make your 
> gnome-2.4 more manageable. If you do install the slackware packages, 
> you'll have to
> recompile gnome-speech and gnopernicus. I'd advise removing the slackware 
> gnopernicus package, as it is a bit out of date. Remove the gnome-speech
> package also, since you're just gonna have to recompile it for freetts 
> again anyway if you want to use it.

That I am aware of, but I will try and use the Slackware packages to see if 
FreeTTS performs any better.

Thanks

Luke