[Asterisk-Users] Poll - Would you pay $30-$50 for high quality speech synthesis?

[John Laur]

> Also almost forgot. They sell the demo voices on their site for 29.99.
> Linux and windows versions. Since I believe what they use is based off
> festival, perhaps the voices could be made to plug into the existing
> festival plugin for asterisk?

I have been working with app_festival for about a week or so now trying
to figure out what is going on with it... The existing app_festival has
a serious bug in it that makes it unsuitable for production use. I
posted about it before, but the jist is that the more channels that are
trying to use app_festival at the same time, the more problems there are
-- the channel will abort, and this will result in asterisk abandoning
the call.  I have tried tracing it with all sorts of things including
stepping back through some truly monumental gdb logs. The problem is not
on the festival side of things, as the preforking festival keeps up fine
with asterisk, and the problem occurs even when using the festival cache
(broken in the current code - my patch fixes it)

I cannot find the bug after a week of poking at the code. As I intended
to use app_festival as a temporary replacement for recorded voice
prompts in an AGI application, it was no big deal at first as it works
100% if if you always wait for the speech to finish and only use one
channel (fine for testing), but after having the flexibility to do
speech synthesis, I can see that it would be a tremendously good
application for even the IVR that I am working on...

Anyway, I hope this speech project gets off the ground. Staying all OSS
is very nice, but after spending a lot of time mucking with it, I'd be
easily willing to spend $50 for a great sounding, working solution. I'm
still going to be poking at app_festival, though, so if anyone has
suggestions or understands some of the internals and wants to work on
this with me, please mail me off-list. Having a 100% working and
production-ready solution for festival would be good for a number of
reasons and I'd like to see this happen too!

~John