Re: [orca-list] Espeak variants was Re: New Linux user, needing higher quality speech

From: kendell clark <coffeekingms gmail com>
To: Luke Yelavich <themuso ubuntu com>, orca-list gnome org
Subject: Re: [orca-list] Espeak variants was Re: New Linux user, needing higher quality speech
Date: Sun, 17 May 2015 21:26:53 -0500

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hi
Just a suggestion. If this is added, would it be feasible to simply
add a second combo box to orca's preferences dialog, available only to
espeak users, labeled something like varient? As a note of comparison,
nvda does this as well. Meaning, nvda thinks of "voices" as languages,
and "varients" are only available in espeak, and I believe the
eloquence driver, but this had to be coded in as a kind of hack, since
eloquence itself doesn't support them. I can't help much, but I can
try to find out more about varients. I believe espeak thinks of voices
as languages, and varients as voices. The different voices are the
different languages, and the varients are ... sort of different
personalities, I think varients are designed to be used with any
language, which is why my solution of turning varients into voices is
suboptimal. I was able to do this for us english, and could, maybe, do
this for all languages, but besides making the espeak folder
unnecessarily larger, it would make the already long voice list in
orca nearly unmanagable.  I have no control over the development of
speech-dispatcher, but I would suggest, and this is just me, that
espeak varient support should be on the list, but at a higher priority
would be cleaning up speech-dispatcher's audio code, putting specific
attention on pulse audio. The only reason I mention this  is because
the most common complaint I hear about linux, above lack of
applications, etc etc, is the crackling speech-dispatcher can
sometimes cause. On some systems, such as mine, it's a few
milliseconds at most, but some it can last seconds, even minutes. I
suspect, but can't prove, that this is caused by speech-dispatcher's
interaction with pulse audio, because the crackling doesn't happen if
orca isn't run, and no other audio stream seems to cause it.
Thanks
Kendell clark



Luke Yelavich wrote:

On Mon, May 18, 2015 at 11:26:57AM AEST, Luke Yelavich wrote:

Re-sending to the Orca list, forgot to reply to all.

On Mon, May 18, 2015 at 09:16:28AM AEST, kendell clark wrote:

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hi Myself, I think this could be partially solved by
implementing proper varient support for speech-dispatcher's
espeak module. The nvda espeak driver does this, but it does
it, I believe, by having it's own special copy of espeak, and
this would be all kinds of inconvenient to deal with, so if
this is done, It should probably either be done by interfacing
with libespeak, or somehow communicating with the espeak code
itself via system calls.


Speech Dispatcher's espeak driver already uses libespeak to do
all speech synthesis. I think at the time the espeak driver was
developed, Espeak didn't have variants. It also doesn't help that
Speech Dispatcher has the concept of variants, but in Speech
Dispatcher terms, variants referrs to languages.

Espeak also doesn't seem to list its variants in its voice list
output, either via Speech Dispatcher or the espeak command-line
utility. So perhaps espeak does need to be extended to make its
variants available via the same way other voices are listed and
used.


Ok, after some digging, it is possible for espeak, and even Speech
Dispatcher to set a voice with a variant. In other words, if a
Speech Dispatcher client is using espeak and knows a voice variant
name, it can set the variant along with a voice directly. Speech
Dispatcher's espeak driver itself makes use of the variants for the
pre-defined male and female voices in the Speech Dispatcher API.

Because variants are meant to be used with all other voice files,
trying to list all voices with all variants makes for a very long
voice list, which is probably why espeak doesn't currently do this.
We could check for a list of variants from the Speech Dispatcher
driver, but again it makes for a long voice list, and even if we
did that, Speech Dispatcher doesn't provide anything generic for
clients to set things such as the voice variant. I do have
something in mind to allow for synthesizer specific settings
however.

Luke _______________________________________________ orca-list
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Follow-Ups:
- Re: [orca-list] Espeak variants was Re: New Linux user, needing higher quality speech
  - From: Luke Yelavich

References:
- Re: [orca-list] New Linux user, needing higher quality speech
  - From: Glenn / Lenny
- Re: [orca-list] New Linux user, needing higher quality speech
  - From: Luke Yelavich
- Re: [orca-list] New Linux user, needing higher quality speech
  - From: kendell clark
- Re: [orca-list] New Linux user, needing higher quality speech
  - From: Luke Yelavich
- [orca-list] Espeak variants was Re: New Linux user, needing higher quality speech
  - From: Luke Yelavich

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