Festival sucks. Cepstral sucks less. The End. In my experience, it depends on the specific app, who's paying, and who's going to be the victim, err...user listening to it. This is the difference between domain/context specific phrases/words to pronounce vs. general stuff, a client on a tight budget or not, the users being internal vs. customers/public, and so on.
Cepstral is a $30 TTS engine. It's not too bad, but you'll find mostly things like Realspeak deployed in large scale "professional" deployments, such as those used by the "big boys", telcos/banks/airlines. We deployed Cepstral recently for a client, for a phone-in service used by the general public, and I can tell you that there was quite a bit of work in "teaching" it with SSML how to pronounce stuff. Again, it really depends on your specific situation. You should definitely try out those two at least and also ensure that the client/stakeholders are aware of limitations. There's a certain expectation of "it will speak perfectly" these days, followed by disappointment and blame when reality hits them. Regards, -- Erik Caneris Tel: 647-723-6365 Fax: 647-723-5365 Toll-free: 1-866-827-0021 www.caneris.com ________________________________________ From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Eric Fort [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, December 02, 2008 3:52 AM To: Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion Subject: [asterisk-users] cepstral vs festival I'm about to begin working on an ivr project to do database backed scheduling. I would like to use text to speech in some places. What are the differences in using festival vs. Cepstral? How are they similar, how are they different? Is one really better than the other? How and Why? Thanks, Eric _______________________________________________ -- Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com -- asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
