I haven't tried to make a new espeak voice either. It would be great
if there were more female and child voices in addition to the existing
male voices in espeak. I suggest you give it a try. If it takes a
lot of ram or cpu time or just a lot of steps for the user, that may
limit the possibilities - or just shape the focus of the project.
Your proposal for making voices easily probably appeals to at least
three groups. First to educators and developers trying to add new
voices for a particular language or country. The second group, is
obviously kids who might like to learn about voice synthesis or just
have the thrill of customizing the laptop to have a new voice. The
final one is the disabled community who would like to use the XO as a
tool to help folks communicate more easily.
I know that the Solomon Island OLPC deployment is interested in
creating voices for the local languages there. ( http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-January/010412.html
) You might want to contact them to see what sort of effort they
have made and what parts they found difficult.
I built Speak because there was no gui for espeak on the XO. It was a
pretty easy thing to make and seems to fill the gap nicely. The more
people put effort into the underlying synthesis engine and more ways
to access it (like the excellent speechd effort) the more powerful the
system will become. Adding more voices will be a great way to expand
the appeal of the system.
-josh
On Apr 5, 2008, at 8:15 AM, Alex Escalona wrote:
HI Josh,
Thank you for voicing your support! It's great to hear that there is
general interest out there for this type of activity.
I have to confess that I have not tried the existing process for
adding a new voice. However, I am aware of the efforts required to
undergo such an undertaking, and hope to make such endeavors more
accessible for XO users and their communities.
Can you share any experiences or knowledge that you might have on
this subject? I understand that you were involved in creating and
maintaining the "Speak" activity on the XO. As well, I have noted
some interest in this proposal on the devel list (e.g., http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-February/011076.html)
. And of course, I know that Hemant Goyal has done considerable work
in forwarding Speechd on the XO as a speech synthesis interface, as
well as advancing efforts in TTS in general.
Best,
Alex
On Fri, Apr 4, 2008 at 10:07 PM, Joshua Minor <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
This is an awesome idea. A couple of people have contacted me to
ask how to add new voices to Speak. It would be great to make this
process easier.
Have you actually tried the existing process for adding a voice?
-josh
On Apr 4, 2008, at 5:58 PM, Alex Escalona wrote:
Hi Everyone,
I just created a page on the OLPC wiki detailing my activity
proposal--"Your voice on XO". I hope to develop this activity via
GSoC 2008. A brief abstract of my proposal follows.
This is a proposal for the creation of a new activity for the XO
that would advance localization efforts in TTS development, as well
as promote the involvement of the local community overall. "Your
voice on XO" would consist of a long-term, community-based project
to build and/or further development of a synthetic voice for the
language used locally (for more on synthetic-voice building, see http://www.festvox.org/bsv/p710.html
, and http://espeak.sourceforge.net/add_language.html).
This activity would entail integrating the voice-building
capabilities of eSpeak, or perhaps Festival, into Sugar on the XO,
as well as working to facilitate synthetic-voice building in a
classroom, or community setting (for an overall view of how the
voice building process might proceed, see http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/emasters/summer_school_2005/tutorial3/tutorial.html)
.
Your feedback and comments are much appreciated!
Best,
Alex Escalona
("vergueishon" on OLPC wiki, IRC)
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