Re: [orca-list] New eSpeak version soon, please send corrections

[Jonathan Duddington <jonsd jsd clara co uk>]

On 18 Nov, Krishnakant <hackingkk gmail com> wrote:

> Hindi with orca sounds absolutely perfect.

I do not believe that :-)

I think eSpeak makes many mistakes about:
1.  Which syllable of a word should have the main stress.
2.  When the "inherent vowel" "a" should be silent, and when it should
be spoken.
3.  Nasal vowels.

But perhaps the eSpeak Hindi voice is good enough to be useful? 

> I just want a few female voices for hindi

eSpeak is not good a female voices.
You can the a female "voice variant" with any language.  If you are
using the eSpeak command-line then you can use something like:

espeak -v hi+f2 -f text.txt

where -v hi+f2  means "Hindi voice plus the 'f2' voice variant".  I
don't know if you can specify voice variants through Orca, perhaps not.

If not, then a solution to this problem would be to make a new voice
file in the directory:  espeak-data/voices

Make a new file called   'hi-f'  which contains the contents of the
voice file 'hi' and then append to it the contents of a voice variant
file (such as 'f2') from the sub-directory !v.

> and would like if we can have marathi in espeak as well.

I can add Marathi if someone who speaks the language wants to work with
me and develop the spelling-to-phoneme translation rules.