Re: Orca Introduction, comments and a question or two

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

Hey Cody:

Nothing secret being done - we're about as transparent as you can get.  

Here's the bug regarding the problem with the festivalized form of
Cepstral:  http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=348210

I think it's a problem that is out of our hands and I'd encourage people
to take this up with the authors of the festivalizer for Cepstral.

Hope this helps,

Will

On Mon, 2006-09-11 at 16:14 -0700, Cody Hurst wrote:
> Gary,
>
>   For your last comment, the reason the pitch is not getting faster is
> because Festival is, in my opinion, a very crappy speech synthesis. If
> you're using a synth such as dectalk or Viavoice then this won't be an
> issue. I think there was a bug filed by Will, but I don't know this
> might be going back a ways back in July, so something might be
> secretly being done about it.
> \
> HTH,
>
> Cody
>
> On 9/10/06, Garry Turkington <garrys lists gmail com> wrote:
> > 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
> > _______________________________________________
> > Orca-list mailing list
> > Orca-list gnome org
> > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list
> _______________________________________________
> Orca-list mailing list
> Orca-list gnome org
> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list