Re: [orca-list] How are you increasing the eSpeak rate beyond what speech-dispatcher permits?

["B. Henry" <burt1iband gmail com>]

Yes, this is correct, been doing it for years.
Just one note, also increase mninium and average speeds so that the jumps between available levels, each 
percent in other words do not grow huge and 
tweaking rates is no longer an option in many cases.
I Raise the bottom end up around 150 wpm as I've never found anyone who speaks Englilsh who can wundrestand 
80wpm and not 150, but I am sure such people 
exist somewhere in the scheme of things.
I put the middle value up around 350, and the high end at 650. 
Thus between 0 and 50 percent each percent increases voice rate aprox. 4 wpm, and each percent increase over 
50% increases speaking rate about 6WPM. 
Unless you need a machine to work for a number of users with very different listening profiles and abilities 
you can of course make the range between 
slowest and fastest r\smaller. I keep some fairly slow speeds available for demos to folks not used to synth 
speech, or at least not used to espeak.
I think there was significantly more phonym loss at some point soon after the sonic code was integrated 
allowing for the crazy fast speech, but that was 
years ago, and while I think some were complaining about some dropped sounds and or other issues a couple 
years back, I did not have the problems.
I've run espeak faster than I could ever use and it still seemed to be pronouncing things well, but I'm 
pretty sure some sylables come out lesss than 
clearly at some point.
   Things are still pronounced well up to around 800wpm I think, but can't honestly tell much when we get up 
around 1000wpm.
I doubt anyone is very productive at anything near max speed, and even at 700words per minute I find myself 
repeating more than makes sense, i.e. I lose 
more than the time I save with faster speech listening to repetition.
oSorry to go on so long, but just to say, I've used the modified espeak module files with both pulse and pure 
alsa running systems, and done so for 4 years 
if a day.
   


-- 
     B.H.
   Registerd Linux User 521886


  kendell clark wrote:
Sat, Sep 03, 2016 at 12:06:36AM -0500

> hi
> while I'm no expert at this, there's a way to increase the maximum rate
> speech-dispatcher will use for espeak. It's in
> /etc/speech-dispatcher/modules/espeak.conf for regular espeak, and
> /etc/speech-dispatcher/modules/espeak-ng.conf for espeak ng. Ng is any
> version after 1.48.15 for those of you who don't know. And joanie the
> experience is *not* aweful. I don't know who wrote that but whoever it
> was frankly does not know what he/she is talking about. If you define
> something as aweful when you need to change one line in a config file
> ... I'll shut up there because if I don't I'll rant. Anyway there's a
> config option called  "# Maximum rate (100 in speech-dispatcher)"
> After that, the option looks like espeak-max-rate followed by a value in
> wpm (words per minute). Nvda's default value for this is 450 wpm, but 
> speech-dispatcher  sets it to 390. Nvda does something odd with espeak
> by having a "rate boost" check box that automatically increases the
> speech rate by some order of magnitude. I'm not sure of the precise
> numbers but it's quite a bit faster than I can understand. Past 450 wpm
> espeak uses a library called "libsonic" to speak faster, and the results
> can sound a bit odd. I think the highest espeak can go is something like
> 1600 words per minute, so you can set this to as high as you want. Save
> and close, and restart speech-dispatcher and you're good to go.
> Thanks
> Kendell Clark
>
>
> Joanmarie Diggs wrote:
> > Hey all.
> >
> > To quote from twitter: "While I can't increase the eSpeak rate as in
> > NVDA, the experience with Orca is awful."
> >
> > Bit of a buzzkill after all the positiveness, but anyway.... I have
> > vague recollections of people working around this. It would be great if
> > someone could save me the trip and give me the answer. <smiles>
> >
> > Thanks!
> > --joanie
> > _______________________________________________
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> > Orca documentation: https://help.gnome.org/users/orca/stable/
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> > Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org
>
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