Re: Festival vs. F-lite disk space requirements

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

Hi:

If one looks at the Venn diagram of Festival/Flite/FreeTTS, the  
common logic is quite similar, but Festival's circle is much much  
larger than the other two.  The common logic from this Venn diagram  
basically consists of a process of preprocessing input text,  
selecting units to play, combining them, and then playing them.   
Unfortunately, the data files are typically the largest hunk of data,  
and each engine uses its own format (Festival == Binary/ASCII EST  
files, Flite == C code, FreeTTS == Binary/ASCII of its own ilk).  In  
retrospect, if we had understood the EST file format and Festival  
signal processing code better, FreeTTS probably could have used  
Festival data directly instead of duplicating the RELP-based approach  
in Flite.

Festival has a core set of logic (Scheme interpreter, scheme files,  
signal processing code, etc.) to deal with voice data, and one can  
download voice data separately for it.  I think the bulk of the data  
consists mostly of pronunciation lexicons and usually some processed  
form of the actual voice recordings (i.e., the "group" file).  To get  
a small set for perhaps en_US only, one could take a look at using  
the kal_diphone voice data and attempt to discover only the bare  
stuff needed to make it work.  You'd probably also want to keep the  
MBROLA support in there as it tends to be small and can interface  
with MBROLA (a separate download) to get you better sounding voices.   
In any case, I *think* you're looking at about 22Meg total for a  
minimal kal_diphone-based en_US festival install, though I think you  
might be able to get 4Meg or so smaller if it's possible to prune  
some what-I-think-might-be-redundant lexicon data.  These numbers are  
based upon my install of festival on my FC4 machine, and may actually  
be extra large because I've been goofing with the ARCTIC and HTS  
voice support.  As an aside, there's some odd interaction between the  
festival server and gnome-speech on Ubuntu, which causes the CPU to  
throttle to 100%.  I took a quick poke at this at one time, and it  
looks like there's something bogus happening on the socket/pipe  
communication between the two.  My current commitments and pressures  
haven't afforded me the time to really dig into and solve the  
problem, though.  :-(

Flite (a C-based engine) is based on data imported from Festival.   
Last I knew, its voice data files are compiled in as source code and  
you get what you get.  I'm not sure there is opportunity for pruning,  
though you could get rid of the unit selection voice that's good for  
only speaking the time.  But...it still tends to be what it is: a  
small, fast, runtime engine.  :-)  It's been a long time since I  
looked at the code, so I don't remember sizing information, but I  
think it is the smallest of the bunch.  There's also no direct gnome- 
speech support for it, other than indirectly through the recently  
added speech-dispatcher driver for gnome-speech (thanks Hynek!).   
Given resources, one probably could write a gnome-speech driver for  
flite and bypass this indirection.

FreeTTS (a Java-based engine) is based on logic from Festival and  
Flite, though it really is mostly a Flite clone in Java.  Like  
Festival, it consists of core logic that can operate on voice data.   
To get a small set, you could ship only what's needed for the kevin  
voices, but you'd probably also want to keep the MBROLA support  
because it has similar benefits as what you get with Festival.  I  
think the total would be about 6.5Meg or so, but then you will also  
need the Java virtual machine.

Hope this helps, and please let me know if you have any more questions,

Will

> I think Flite uses the same file format. ( Will, please correct me if
> I'm wrong).  It also requires a Java JRE, are you planning to include
> Java in the live CD?

> BTW, in the past, Java was required for  OpenOffice.org accessibility,
> but that's not true of the latest version.
>
> Bill
>
> On Fri, 2006-02-24 at 12:25, Henrik Nilsen Omma wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > We are working on packaging screen reader support for the Ubuntu Live
> > CD, but have gotten ourselves a little confused regarding file  
> > sizes ...
> >
> > Being a Live CD we are quite limited on disk space. We were thinking
> > that we should use the smaller F-lite, rather than the full Festival,
> > assuming it had smaller speech files. However, because gnome-speech
> > doesn't have direct support for F-lite we also needed to include  
> > speech
> > dispatcher (and gnome-speech from CVS), so it begins to grow.
> >
> > Can anyone shed some light on the relative space requirements of
> > Festival vs. F-lite? Does Festival include all it's supported  
> > languages
> > by default or are they packaged separately (as packaged in  
> > Debian)? We
> > would be happy to settle for English-only support this time around.
> >
> > Thank you. Any advice will be greatly appreciated.
> >
> > - Henrik
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > gnome-accessibility-list mailing list
> > gnome-accessibility-list gnome org
> > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-accessibility-list
>
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