[asterisk-users] cepstral vs festival

[Erik (Caneris)]

>
> Erik -
>    Have you found RealSpeak to be worth the cost?
>
Actually my last note was probably a bit misleading because in the particular cases I mentioned RealSpeak, the platform wasn't Asterisk and Cepstral wasn't even on the radar.

> Can Cepstral, with
> the hourly $ spent on tuning, be made to be a reasonable substitute?
Nuance would say "no" :)
I'd say "maybe". Call up +14164854854, it's a recent project we did for a client using Asterisk, Cepstral, and a lot of custom code. It's a free phone-in service that allows folks to get local traffic, weather, news, commuter transit, border crossing wait times, and more. There's obviously quite a bit of domain-specific, dynamic, constantly changing text, so this is certainly an example of pushing it to the max. Just think of all the street names it has the potential to mispronounce.
It's a work in progress, but it's very promising. Definitely an example of a lot of "hourly $ spent on tuning" as you put it.

> My results: The RealSpeak sample was more clear than the Cepstral.
Depends on what you mean by "more clear". As Brent Davidson mentions, make sure you're comparing 8khz to 8khz, or similar. If you mean it pronounces things better, then I agree.

> That being said, I'd really be interested in hearing if anyone has
> done a RealSpeak-to-Asterisk conduit.  I wasn't able to quickly
> uncover how they interact with third-party systems - is it VoIP?  A C
> library?  Some sort of HTTP socket?  The more methods we can get
> working with Asterisk, the better, because not every implementation of
> a voice system has the same requirements...
>
MRCP is the standard for interfacing with ASR and TTS engines (including RealSpeak) in other platforms. Brief Googling reveals a previous flame war on asterisk-dev regarding MRCP. I have no idea if it's implemented in Asterisk now.


Regards,
--
Erik
Caneris
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