Hello, Boris, I prepared instructions for people who wanted to try Festival out a couple of years ago. They are very strongly geared towards users of Vinux but, I think they can be adapted to a wider audience. I just lack the time and motivation to do so at present. I'm attaching a copy of this file written in html in case you would care to use some of its content to flesh out the guide you all have written which does a nice job of addressing the more technical points. Thanks. Alex M On 6/4/12, Boris DuÅek <dusek brailcom org> wrote:
Title: Getting Festival To Work In Vinux4. 6. 2012 v 12:24, David Sexton:Great to get instructions... however the files listed in the instructions give 404 not found errorsthe files are now online, I apologize for the errors _______________________________________________ orca-list mailing list orca-list gnome org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca. The manual is at http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-access-guide/nightly/ats-2.html The FAQ is at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org Find out how to help at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/HowCanIHelp
It is handy to have more than one speech synthesizer as a choice for use with your screen readers. This document gives a brief description on how to get Festival to work in vinux so that it can be used as an option with Orca using Vinux 3.0 based on Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx. I'm sure this will also work on Vinux 3.1 since most of this stuff is done using the command line. Once you are done, your system will have Festival as a fully functioning tts system for use by any program you want to use it with. For setting up Speakup with Festival as an option, please consult the Speakup user's manual.
Please read my instructions in this document all the way through and very carefully before you do anything. For testing festival, do it in the terminal or console as I explain below. Do *not* under any circumstances and despite any temptations to the contrary just go into your orca speech preferences and change your synth to Festival until you can successfully get it to output speech using the method I illustrate. I did and I lost speech with orca till I figured out how to get it back. You have been warned.
First, test to
see if you have festival installed and working. Here is what you do. In a terminal, type the
following:
festival --version
If you have it, you will hear the version number and the year. If,
however, you don't come up with anything, go get it from the synaptic
package manager and install any voice that has at least 16 kps along
with any suggested or recommended packages Synaptic says you need.
Once you have determined that Festival is on your system or, if you didn't have it already, once you have installed it, you need to test it to see if it will talk to you. We will do this by telling the terminal to echo some text in quotation marks
and then piping that command to festival with a tts flag so it just
gets spoken as a message without launching you into festival's front
end application. Again, in a terminal, type:
echo "Howdy, partner" | festival --tts
Please note the quotation marks and the pipe or vertical bar as some screen
readers render it along with the double hyphen before the tts flag. The vertical bar is the shift backslash key on a u.s. keyboard. If the computer talks to you and says what you wrote in quotation marks in a
markedly different voice from e-speak, it works and you just go into
orca speech preferences, select gnome-speech services as your speech
server and festival as your synth with kal male american english as
the voice and you are in business. Unfortunately, this is highly unlikely though.
If it doesn't say anything and all you get is a command prompt, (this is a
99% possibility), then, as usual, your Vinux is set up with festival
trying to output sound through the Enlighten Sound Daemon (ESD)
instead of Pulse Audio. There is some sort of bug with ESD that makes Festival unhappy. Another possibility is that Festival is trying to talk using Oss which, apparently, makes Pulse Audio very unhappy. So that everyone gets along nicely, we have to tell Festival to send its output through pulse audio by pasting a few lines to the bottom of
/usr/share/festival/init.scm. So, here's what you do again, in a
terminal:
sudo gedit /usr/share/festival/init.scm
Once you have the file up, press control end (that's e-en-d not n as in nancy for those of you using speech to access this document) to get you all the
way down to the very bottom of the file and press enter to make sure
you are on a new line. Now, paste the following lines of code exactly
as written:
;;;; Use pulseaudio to output sound (Parameter.set 'Audio_Command "paplay -n festival $FILE") (Parameter.set 'Audio_Method 'Audio_Command) (Parameter.set 'Audio_Required_Format 'snd)
Hit control s to save your file and control q to exit Gedit. Now,
again, in a terminal, we do our little test:
echo "Talk, blast you, you stupid thing!" | festival --tts
If everything went according to plan, Festival will say what you put in the quotation marks. If it doesn't, you may have to go back to Synaptic and make sure that you have all the Feslex, Festvox, and voice components you need. Whatever you do, under no circumstances are you to try and change Orca to talk with Festival as its speech synthesizer until you can get festival to spit something out at you during terminal mode using the commands listed here. If you do, you run the risk of Orca not talking at all.
If you got excited, didn't listen to me and did change your synth to Festival without testing it in the terminal, because you are the gambling sort and lost, do the following in what I assume is a console running Speakup:
Orca's text-based setup program comes up and you can tell it to use speech dispatcher and e-speak again to restore your speech settings to how they were before. Once this program finishes, alt f7 to go back to Gnome and do a shift control o to restart orca. If the settings didn't stick for some reason, go back to the console and type sudo orca instead of just orca. I never had to do this but it's what I would've tried. The best thing to do is not to change your speech synth from e-speak until you are absolutely certain Festival talks.
If you are not careful, or you just got curious and typed Festival without the flags I indicated in a command prompt, you will find yourself inside Festival's front end application. Using this application is beyond the scope of this tutorial however, the interface is similar to that of Emacs so, if you are familiar with Emacs, you should be able to make it do all sorts of things. If all you want to do is get out of it, though, just type control d and you will return to the command line.
And that's it! You may find, as I did, that Festival doesn't work as nicely as e-speak in some ways or, who knows, different strokes for different folks, you might like the way it works. The problem I found was that Orca would talk over itself when navigating rapidly through a dialog box. I got annoyed and went scuttling back to E-speak and immediately set upon the task of getting the Mbrola voices to become usable with Orca through E-speak. but that, dear friends, is a tale for another telling. That's me being creative about saying I have no idea how this is done yet but will get back to you when I figure it out.