Re: GNOME 2 Sound Architecture and APIs?

[Bill Haneman <bill haneman ireland sun com>]

John Heard wrote:

<snip>

> One reason for my question is because I had a good discussion with Alan Black
> from over at CMU and we discussed how we might bring the Festival, Flite and
> maybe also Sphynx projects alongside the GNOME project. Alan was very keen to be
> able to achieve this.

I talked with Alan at the Linux Accessibility Conference as well, and
exchanged some email - I was really encouraged by his interest in
moving into this space with Festival/Flite (thanks Alan!).  My
impression is that there are only a couple of technical barriers
remaining, most of which will be addressed by Flite I think.  The big
unsolved issue is generating the "speeded up" voices which are
preferred by most blind users.  I think we can do it in discrete
steps, but we may not be able to generate a continuous range of speech
rates using Festival's concatenative synthesis technique.

I should also mention that Jim Gettys (now with Compaq) expressed keen
interest in Festival/Flite as a text-to-speech engine for the iPAQ -
Jim is involved in putting together a linux distribution for iPAQ.

We (myself and Marc Mulcahy) are anxiously awaiting the first
developer release of Flite!

<snip>

> Festival could be used to generate voice "localizations" for this service

John: not sure I see exactly what you mean here - so far all our
text-to-speech has presupposed some (localized/localizable)
pre-existing text content to speak.  Are you suggesting that Festival
could move into the translation space ???  

In the multi-locale case, which we are starting to see more often,
indeed we need some way of doing markup on our text so that a
synthesis engine (festival/flite) can decide which language databases
to use in generating an utterance:

"John said, 'una mas, por favor', as he leaned back in his chair."

My impression is that flite ( not just festival ) could handle this. 
Alan?
 
> Alan, you might want to comment?
> 
> Rgds
> John

-- 
--------------
Bill Haneman
Gnome Accessibility / Batik SVG Toolkit
Sun Microsystems Ireland

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