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

[Chris Albertson]

--- Jared Smith <jsmith at drgutah.com> wrote:
> Would you mind giving us a few examples on how we can make festival
> sound better?  (Some sample festival configs would be nice!)
> 
> Jared

See my later post where I say "Sorry here is the URL"
http://fife.speech.cs.cmu.edu/festival/

You might want to look at "Festvox" which is a tool for
creating new festival databases and also at "sable" which
is a markup language that allows to you to pass hints to
festival like this:

   As a test of marked-up numbers. Here we have 
   a year <SAYAS MODE="date">1998</SAYAS>, 
   an ordinal <SAYAS MODE="ordinal">1998</SAYAS>, 
   a cardinal <SAYAS MODE="cardinal">1998</SAYAS>, 
   a literal <SAYAS MODE="literal">1998</SAYAS>, 
   and phone number <SAYAS MODE="phone">1998</SAYAS>.

So, one way to improve the voice quality is to have the software
which generates the text to be spoken embed some mark-up
THe software would "know" if it is generating a phone number,
street addres or a error message and could ad the required
marks

If you poke around you will find a huge body of software that is
centered around festival in some way.  In fact I would not be
surprized at all to find the the AT&T voice synthizer is
festival based.  I see that At&T is partially funding the work
done at CMU and festival has no restriction or comercial
use (It is NOT GPL'd it's more like X11)

> 
> On Tue, 2003-07-15 at 14:41, Chris Albertson wrote:
> > --- Jeff Noxon <jeff-asterisk at planetfall.com> wrote:
> > > Many of you are familiar with how lousy Festival sounds.
> > > 
> > > AT&T has a product, NaturalVoices, that sounds much better. 
> There
> > > are
> > > male & female voice fonts for US/UK/Indian English, French,
> Spanish,
> > > and German.
> > 
> > Festival only sounds bad because you are using it in a very simple
> way.
> > It comes with a "demo" text to speech application that really is no
> > more then a demo but most people just use the demo app and think
> > Festival itself sounds bad.  You need to read a bit more.  Also at
> > the cmu.edu web site are some tools for building your own voices.
> > These can sound very good and speeak other languages.
> > If you work at it the sound can be very natural.
> > 
> > =====
> > Chris Albertson
> >   Home:   310-376-1029  chrisalbertson90278 at yahoo.com
> >   Cell:   310-990-7550
> >   Office: 310-336-5189  Christopher.J.Albertson at aero.org
> >   KG6OMK
> > 
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=====
Chris Albertson
  Home:   310-376-1029  chrisalbertson90278 at yahoo.com
  Cell:   310-990-7550
  Office: 310-336-5189  Christopher.J.Albertson at aero.org
  KG6OMK

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