Re: [orca-list] plugging other language voices

["Ishwor Thapa" <rowhsi gmail com>]

On 5/29/07, Willie Walker <William Walker sun com> wrote:

> I tried running orca in debain and it worked well. Thanks to orca
> developers. Now I want to add Nepali language voices to the orca. The
> orca preferences loaded newer voices after adding voice in the
> festival itself.

Great!

Thanks

> Now what I am trying to do is install orca in Nepalinux (debian based
> linux in Nepali Language, the script being Devanagari). As festival
> wouldn't take devanagari utf8 directly, we previously used
> transliteration in perl. Now it seems we need to do similar in
> python.

Yikes!  This might be a bit troublesome.  The access to festival is done
via gnome-speech.  The gnome-speech support for festival runs
(g_spawn_async_with_pipes) the festival process with the --server
option.  The pipes/sockets are then used to communicate with the
festival process.

I'm not sure of a way for you to get something in the loop.  One way
might be to override the festival command with one of your own and then
sit in the middle between the real festival and gnome-speech.

Another way might be to try to write some festival SCHEME and do the
transliteration inside festival as part of the synthesis process.

I did the transliteration part inside the festival in the lexicon file itself. Now festival is reading texts in the nepali unicode fonts.

I have ubunty (feisty fawn) in which I've installed festival with its dependencies and festival-freebsoft-utils packages.In Orca preferences, kal_diphone is listed with the festival GNOME speech driver.

So, I simply copied my nepali voice into the /usr/share/festival/voices/ directory but it is not listed in the orca voice list.

I then installed hindi-NSK voice and it was listed in the orca voice list.

The most important difference I noticed was that the voices listed by Orca were diphone voices but I have festvox unit selection voice for nepali language.

Is it that the orca only supports diphone voices or there is something to be configured?

Will

Ishwor