Re: [orca-list] still looking for good festival voices in for Orca

[Thomas Ward <thomasward1978 gmail com>]

Hi Krishnakant,

Probably what you are looking for is the CMU Artic voices. They are
several times better than the voices in the Ubuntu repositories. You
can go to
http://festvox.org/cmu_arctic/
and download the voices you want. They have both male and female
voices available.

To install the voices you will first need the Festival CMU package.
Open up terminal and do
sudo apt-get install festlex-cmu
which will install the lexicon dependencies you will need. Now,
download any of the voices you want from the artic voices page, and
you will install them manually. Here is an example of how to install
one of the U.S. female voices and make it the default voice for
Festival.

sudo cp cmu_us_slt_arctic-0.95-release.tar.bz2
/usr/share/festival/voices/english/
cd /usr/share/festival/voices/english/
sudo tar jxf cmu_us_slt_arctic-0.95-release.tar.bz2
sudo ln -s cmu_us_slt_arctic cmu_us_slt_arctic_clunits
sudo cp /etc/festival.scm /etc/festival.scm.backup
sudo echo "(set! voice_default 'voice_cmu_us_slt_arctic_clunits)" >>
/etc/festival.scm

Now, with luck the voice is now installed and setup to be your default
voice. However, while these voices are superior to the default voices
for Festival they are slower. I think they are intended for reading
rather than for screen readers so they aren't as responsive as you are
probably use too. Still, they are definitely some nice voices to have.

Also there is the MBrola voices. Off the top of my head I don't recall
how to install them, but they are also superior to the default
Festival voices.

        Cheers!

On 6/13/12, Krishnakant Mane <krmane gmail com> wrote:
> Hello all,
> I had previously emailed for asking about setting up festival with Orca.
> I have gone far enough to to get festival, speech dispatcher and Orca
> working well.
> Also managed to get a few voices installed.
> But I could not find the good voices which many have talked about on
> this very list.
> I remember some one refering to 22 k voices and a few good quality
> voices for British English.
> I could not even find any female voices.
> Can some one tell me how to set these up with Orca?
> And if I do set it up with Orca, will I face performance problems even
> with speech dispatcher between Orca and festival?
> Happy hacking.
> Krishnakant.
>
> _______________________________________________
> orca-list mailing list
> orca-list gnome org
> https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list
> Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca.
> The manual is at
> http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-access-guide/nightly/ats-2.html
> The FAQ is at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions
> Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org
> Find out how to help at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/HowCanIHelp