Re: Orca Introduction, comments and a question or two

[Joanmarie Diggs <j-diggs comcast net>]

Hey guys.  

I tried taking it up with the folks at Cepstral but got no response.
Since the conversation has come back up, I took a look at the
festivalizer for Cepstral.  I think I have the fix.

In festivalify-cepstral-voice.pl, line 233, change this line:

    (set! wpm (* 170 (Param.get "Duration_Stretch")))

to this line:

    (set! wpm (/ 170 (Param.get "Duration_Stretch")))

Re-festivalize the voice.

Having done the above, Orca works with my Cepstral voice as I would
expect.  

Hope this helps!
Joanie

On Fri, 2006-09-15 at 15:06 -0400, Willie Walker wrote:
> 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
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