Re: hardware synthesisers.

[Milan Zamazal <pdm brailcom org>]

>>>>> "LY" == Luke Yelavich <themuso themuso com> writes:

    LY> I think this is the big issue. It is fine to support things like
    LY> Emacspeak servers, and speech dispatcher, but they may not all
    LY> support things such as end of speech notification like Bill
    LY> said, as well as speech interrupt, and markers.

    LY> For example, Festival can work with Gnopernicus, but doesn't
    LY> support such things AFAIK.

There are several a bit differing issues in your remark.

Festival is primarily a *speech synthesis* system, not exceptionally
well suited for advanced practical use.  But it's the best completely
free speech synthesis system we have and it's equipped with an extension
language (the other options I'm aware of, Epos and Flite, are not easily
extensible and don't come with free good voices).  There are many things
you can do with the extension language.  And maybe, if Festival became a
tool more widely used for applications, its upstream authors could be
more interested in adding features oriented towards practical use to the
Festival core.

So we at Brailcom try to do our best within the Free(b)soft project to
extend Festival facilities necessary for practical advanced use.  The
festival-freebsoft-utils package
(http://www.freebsoft.org/festival-freebsoft-utils) already provides
many interesting features in this area.  The forthcoming 0.2 release
will contain an experimental SSML and index marking support.

Speech Dispatcher support for SSML and index marking is planned to
follow soon.

As for speech interrupt, end of speech notification and similar things,
if you use a hardware speech synthesizer, you are always limited.  One
of important advantages of software speech synthesizers is that they can
be customized.  With software speech synthesizers the synthesized sound
sample is completely in your hands, so you solve the problems of speech
interrupts and end of speech notifications exactly once for all the
synthesizers together (while with a hardware synthesizer you might not
be able to solve the problem at all for a particular device).

Regards,

Milan Zamazal

-- 
It's amazing how much better you feel once you've given up hope.
                                                (unknown source)