Orca Introduction, comments and a question or two

[Garry Turkington <garrys lists gmail com>]

Hi all,

I've just started playing with Orca on a shiny new Edgy install and I must 
say that speech engine aside (more below) it's been a surprisingly 
pleasant experience.  Given the relatively young status of Orca I think 
it's in great shape and shows tremendous potential.  Hats off to all 
involved in the effort.

My road to getting Orca was a slightly convoluted one though much of that 
can be categorised as self-inflicted wounds.  After years of relying on 
console access to Linux via either a DOS terminal session or Speakup 
directly I've wanted to experiment with the Gnome tools for some time. 
Due to other activities and the general home IT set-up my strong 
preference was to do so under VMware Workstation with my main Windows box 
as the host.

When I first tried this several months ago I discovered that most software 
speech engines turn into random noise engines under VMware.  I strongly 
suspect this is due to some channel timing issues but can't prove that.  I 
never got a software speech engine working well enough under VMware to be 
usable so gave up and only returned to the topic this weekend.  I know 
that some other people were hitting their heads against the same wall so 
can report that the Swift voices from Cepstral now work 'out of the box' 
under VMware; previously they required to be set in mono mode which 
couldn't easily be done from a higher-level speech layer.

So my set-up now is using a Cepstral Swift voice via Festival, using the 
"festivalify-cepstral-voice" Perl script provided by Cepstral.  Hack 
Festival and you can make the Swift voice the default and this provides a 
working TTS engine under VMware.  Hopefully that info will be of use to 
someone else.

That leads nicely into the first of my three questions, I find the 
performance of Orca under this set-up to be pretty sluggish.  I suspect 
the problem isn't really Orca itself, more a combination of a beta OS, the 
use of Festival as an intermediary layer and the VMware overhead.  Playing 
with some C test apps on the VM I am suspecting the Festival machinery as 
the native Swift code seems more responsive than via Festival.   Anyone 
got experience with using Festival in this way or care to point the finger 
elsewhere?

My next point may have me stirring up a hornet's nest but I'll take the 
risk.  There seems to be an embarrassment of riches when it comes to 
intermediary TTS layers.  There's Gnome-speech, there's Speech Dispatcher 
and as I've found even  good old Festival can  act in this role.  I know 
that all these tools evolved from different backgrounds and had distinct 
initial needs they were trying to meet but the situation now seems 
somewhat duplicative to me.  I may be betraying my background in 
distributed systems where abstraction layers get slapped atop anything 
that moves but is this situation as confused as I find it and if so is 
there any sort of convergence going forward?  Alternatively am I missing 
the point somewhere?

Final question is less controversial.  I find that setting the voice rate 
in the Orca control panel has no effect on the actual spoken speed. 
Insert and left/right arrows tell me the rate is being increased or 
decreased but I find it either has no effect or actually does the reverse. 
I'm suspecting this a consequence of my funky Festival/Swift set-up as I 
don't see any such bugs on Bugzilla and I guess this would be an obvious 
one if it was universal.

Many thanks for any input and I look forward to exploring Orca more over 
the next days.

Regards,
Garry

--
Garry Turkington
garry turkington gmail com