Willie,
you should be able to subscribe at:
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/desktop/discussions/
Darren
Willie Walker wrote:
> Hi All:
>
> This message was forwarded to me by several people on this list. I'm in the
> process of figuring out how to join the list, so I'm using the web-based
> interface to compose my response right now.
>
> I currently lead the Orca screen reader project and I also led the FreeTTS
> project. I think there are two separate problems here:
>
> 1) The quality of FreeTTS output when speaking the language it supports.
> 2) Which languages FreeTTS supports.
>
> The first is sometimes referred to as the "Swedish Chef" problem. I believe
> the joke came in around 1976 when Ray Kurzweil introduced his Reading
> Machine. At the time, people referred to the voice as sounding like the
> "Swedish Chef" from the Muppets.
>
> The second is what I think Lars is referring to. TTS engines need knowledge
> and support for the language of the text they are speaking. FreeTTS
> currently doesn't have support for Swedish as far as I know. Tossing Swedish
> text at it is like tossing Swedish text at a US English speaker and having
> them guess at the proper pronunciation. Hence, Lars' question about what is
> involved in making FreeTTS voices.
>
> Creating voices for FreeTTS is similar to creating voices for it's parent
> system, Festival. A lot of different kinds of data are needed, and it
> requires a fair amount of speech domain knowledge. In addition, given all
> this, you're never really guaranteed to end up with a good voice.
>
> As an alternative, I'm hoping we can port eSpeak
> (http://espeak.sourceforge.net/) and the gnome-speech driver for eSpeak to
> Solaris. I think it might be an easier task to accomplish this than creating
> a new voice for FreeTTS, and the benefits of this include the following:
>
> 1) eSpeak has support for a large number of locales, and the process for
> supporting new locales seems to be well documented.
>
> 2) eSpeak is smaller than FreeTTS, perhaps helping set us up for an
> accessible install.
>
> Lars - is working on a port of eSpeak to Solaris something you might be able
> to help with?
>
> Will
>
>
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