sridhar wrote: > I'm wondering if there's anything we can do to make TTS sound more > 'human'. We'd like to be able to use the XOs to teach English > literacy, but the espeak voices are very robotic. > > My understanding is that espeak is optimised for low-power devices > (great for XOs) and clear (if robotic) speech. Would it be feasible to > switch to something else, like festival?
i've run festival as part of my home automation system for many many years, including the last 3 or so on an XO-1 (debxo) which acts as my current HA server. the first secret is to run it in client/server mode, to avoid the server startup latency on every enunciation. but even after that, i think the latency will be too high for your application. i just tested it: given a moderate english sentence, it took 3 seconds to produce output. (i hide this on my system by caching utterances -- that's more feasible in a menuing system than when teaching literacy.) http://dev.laptop.org/~pgf/junk/festival_out.wav (5 seconds on XO-1) flite is a lower cost version of festival that might be appropriate. it seems to reduce the conversion time to about half a second. but the quality suffers as well. http://dev.laptop.org/~pgf/junk/flite_out.wav (.5 seconds on XO-1) fyi, current festival server process footprint: root 999 0.0 9.4 26668 20004 ? Ss Jun06 10:03 /usr/bin/festival --server /usr/local/etc/nosil.scm i haven't used espeak -- i suspect there are API interfaces that are far richer than what i'm doing from the shell commandline. i don't know how one might access festival at that level. paul > > This is some food for thought: > http://braille.uwo.ca/pipermail/speakup/2008-July/046755.html > > Sridhar > > > Sridhar Dhanapalan > Technical Manager > One Laptop per Child Australia > M: +61 425 239 701 > E: srid...@laptop.org.au > A: G.P.O. Box 731 > Sydney, NSW 2001 > W: www.laptop.org.au > _______________________________________________ > Devel mailing list > Devel@lists.laptop.org > http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel =--------------------- paul fox, p...@laptop.org _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel