Re: [orca-list] Mbrola working

[Jonathan Duddington <jonsd jsd clara co uk>]

On 24 Nov, Krishnakant Mane <hackingkk gmail com> wrote:

> A couple of questions.
> 1, is embrola free software?

Mbrola is free, "no cost".
It is not open source.

> 2, how different it sounds as compared to espeak?

The best way to answer that question is to try it and listen.

You can download mbrola voices for various languages at:
http://www.tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/mbrola/mbrcopybin.html

Mbrola is not a full text-to-speech system.  It converts
phonemes-to-speech, but it needs some other software to convert text
into phonemes and pitch information, which is then passed to mbrola.

You can use eSpeak for this purpose.  Details are at:
http://espeak.sourceforge.net/mbrola.html

But if you want Hindi, you will need to improve eSpeak's
text-to-phoneme translation for Hindi.  eSpeak's Hindi has had little
work done on it and needs improvement.

> By the way can embrola be used with festival as well or is it a some
> kind of module with espeak?

Yes, I think that you can use mbrola voices with festival, where
festival does the text-to-phoneme translation.  I don't know the
details.