I think that David's advice was pretty good. The AT&T, Ivona, Neospeech and other modern SAPI voices are concatenative synthesizers. They need to throw more than a hundred megabytes of data around in order to string speech units together. When you alter their speed or pitch, they have to work a little harder, still. DecTalk and Eloquence speech will always be a lot more responsive because they compute speech parameters and generate audio from scratch, rather than having to look up the speech units in a database. Microsoft Sam, Mike, Ana and Mary fall in between on the processor utilization scale, I think.
I don't know whether any of our technology is taking advantage of multi-core processors or not. But disk and memory access may still be a bottleneck. If you want to run these high-end synthesizers, you'll have to limit what other stuff is running simultaneously. Lloyd Rasmussen, Kensington, Maryland Home: http://lras.home.sprynet.com Work: http://www.loc.gov/nls > -----Original Message----- > From: Jenine Stanley [mailto:[email protected]] > Sent: Friday, May 06, 2011 8:32 AM > To: [email protected] > Subject: speech breaking up and distorting > > I have 2 computers and they both are having an odd issue lately with their > synthesizers. Both run WE 7.5 > > Desktop runs Windows7, with Ivona Kendra speech synthesizer. > > From time to time the speech will break up, like an old radio that's > poorly > tuned. Sometimes also when adjusting the pitch, which I like at 2, the > speech will become distorted as if it's too loud though the volume hasn't > changed at all. The breaking up tends to fix itself but the distortion > requires a complete reboot of the computer, not just shutting down WE and > restarting. > > Laptop is running Windows XP with the AT&T Crystal synthesizer. I have WE > start prior to log in and nothing has changed with the DECTalk speech. The > last several days, when I boot up, and the speech changes over to Crystal, > the voice is very distorted as if through a bad AM radio speaker. This is > continuous, unlike the desktop computer issue. The only way to fix it is > to > exit WE and restart it. Then the speech returns to normal. > > Any idea what might be going on here? > If you reply to this message it will be delivered to the original sender > only. If your reply would benefit others on the list and your message is > related to GW Micro, then please consider sending your message to gw- > [email protected] so the entire list will receive it. > > GW-Info messages are archived at http://www.gwmicro.com/gwinfo. You can > manage your list subscription at http://www.gwmicro.com/listserv. If you reply to this message it will be delivered to the original sender only. If your reply would benefit others on the list and your message is related to GW Micro, then please consider sending your message to [email protected] so the entire list will receive it. GW-Info messages are archived at http://www.gwmicro.com/gwinfo. You can manage your list subscription at http://www.gwmicro.com/listserv.
