Re: [orca-list] Should Orca have a separate "reading" voice? (was: audio demo of Neospeech and Svox-Pico with Orca/speakup)

[Bill Cox <waywardgeek gmail com>]

I found the pico2wave executable.  It segfaults.  I don't mind taking
a quick peek to see why it's crashing, in case it's easy.  Does anyone
know how to talk to the developers?

Thanks,
Bill

On Sun, May 16, 2010 at 7:35 AM, Bill Cox <waywardgeek gmail com> wrote:
> I see that there's a new svox package at Debian.  I've compiled and
> installed it, but I don't know how to run it.  Can you give me any
> pointers?
>
> Thanks,
> Bill
>
> On Sun, May 16, 2010 at 2:29 AM, Jason White <jason jasonjgw net> wrote:
> > Joanmarie Diggs <joanmarie diggs gmail com> wrote:
> >
> > > Willem, thanks for doing this! Ignoring the issues you found, the
> > > Neospeech voice does sound awfully nice.
> >
> > They're probably using concatenation synthesis, i.e., techniques which combine
> > pre-recorded speech segments such as diphones, triphones, etc., then "smooth"
> > the result. This approach requires large databases, which is why such
> > synthesizers tend to consume substantial memory, disk space, or both.
> >
> > In contrast, SVOX Pico uses a relatively new technology in speech synthesis,
> > based on hidden Markov models, where the voice is entirely synthetic rather
> > than pre-recorded, but the synthesizer parameters are obtained from a
> > statistical model trained on real speech data. Machine learning techniques are
> > used in the textual analysis phase as well. As a result, it is very small in
> > regard to memory use, hence suitable for embedded devices such as mobile
> > phones, as well as installation media and almost any other context in which
> > one would want a small, efficient synthesizer with quality output. There are
> > limitations, of course, and it has its share of problems, but technologically
> > it's the result of very serious research by specialists in signal processing
> > and computational linguistics, and a significant contribution to free and
> > open-source software.
> >
> > It would be nice if someone would fix the segfault under x86-64 that manifests
> > itself in the internal memory allocator, though.
> >
> > Disclaimer: I am absolutely not qualified to discuss speech synthesis in
> > depth, an undergraduate course in phonetics notwithstanding.
> > > This raises a question in my mind: If we're potentially going to have
> > > access to speech synthesizers which are more human-sounding but perhaps
> > > less performant, should Orca have a separate reading voice or SayAll
> > > voice or some such thing? In other words, when you're typing, navigating
> > > in menus and dialogs, etc., Orca would use one voice. When you're
> > > reading text (and/or doing a SayAll), Orca would use another voice.
> >
> > There may be synthesizers that require this. SVOX Pico shouldn't be one of
> > them, since it is designed to remain highly responsive in embedded
> > environments where CPU and memory resources are highly constrained.
> >
> > Someone ought to write an OpenTTS module for it.
> >
> > I don't know what the performance characteristics of concatenation
> > synthesizers are; they certainly take up more memory than ESpeak, SVOX Pico
> > and other small synthesizers. Bell Labs' TTS contains hundreds of megabytes of
> > speech data just for English, for example, which is one of the reasons for its
> > high quality speech - there are many pre-recorded segments for the selection
> > algorithm to choose from.
> >
> > Aside from performance, users may however want different synthesizers under
> > different circumstances, so I'm not suggesting this is a bad idea at all.
> >
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