Re: Orca Introduction, comments and a question or two

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

Hi Garry:

Thanks for the useful information regarding TTS and VMWare!

> 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?

I've not had personal experience with using Orca under VMWare, so I'm
not sure if VMWare is causing undo overhead.  The Festival
responsiveness is OK, but you will most likely have a much better
experience with a commercial engine such as DECtalk.

> 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?

IMO, TTS API's can be simple to spec out and easy to get wrong, so
everybody has decided to do one because the previous guy didn't do it
right.  :-)

There's is some work afoot to try to converge on a "standard" TTS API
for the Linux platform, however:
http://www.freebsoft.org/doc/tts-api/tts-api.html.  

> 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.

I believe this is a bug with the "festivalization" process for the
Cepstral voices.  For more info, see:

   http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=348210

Thanks and thanks for your interest in Orca!

Will