Re: [orca-list] plugging other language voices

[Jan Buchal <buchal brailcom org>]

> > > > > "IT" == Ishwor Thapa <rowhsi gmail com> writes:

    IT> 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.
   
    IT> Great!

    IT> 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.
   
    IT> Yikes! This might be a bit troublesome. The access to festival
    IT> is done via gnome-speech. The gnome-speech support for festival
    IT> runs (g_spawn_async_with_pipes) the festival process with the
    IT> --server option. The pipes/sockets are then used to communicate
    IT> with the festival process.
   
    IT> I'm not sure of a way for you to get something in the loop. One
    IT> way might be to override the festival command with one of your
    IT> own and then sit in the middle between the real festival and
    IT> gnome-speech.
   
    IT> Another way might be to try to write some festival SCHEME and do
    IT> the transliteration inside festival as part of the synthesis
    IT> process.

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

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

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

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

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

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


Hi,

I tried install hindi festival voice and add as voice default in
festival configuration file:

(set! voice_default 'voice_hindi_NSK_ddiphone)

and then I use speech dispatcher backend in orca. For now is not
possible choose betwen more voices or languages in speech dispatcher
backend but we add ASAP this functionality to speech dispatcher protocol
and then in to speech dispatcher backend. So then you will can chose
betwen more voices, hindi nepali etc. Now is possible use this switching
in speechd-el if you add these lines to your festival
configuration file:

(require 'voice-select)
(set! language-codes (cons '(hi hindi) language-codes))

and if you have installed festival-freebsoft-utils of course.

Best

-- 

Jan Buchal
Tel: (00420) 24 24 86 008
Mob: (00420) 608023021