[Asterisk-Users] Text to Speech - Someone needs to do this

[Steve Underwood]

Moshe Yudkowsky wrote:

> At 10:11 2003-07-16 -0700, Chris Albertson wrote:
>
> <SNIP>
>
>> if you want a synthetic voice to sound
>> natural you will have to tell the software the _intent_ of the words
>> not just the words.  You would need a markup language for that
>>
>> <emph> I </emph> said <quote><questionword> yes </quote></questionword>
>
>
> The W3C has a TTS markup language, SSML, 
> <http://www.w3.org/TR/speech-synthesis/>. However, SSML is not a 
> _semantic_ markup language. SSML gives directives about prosidy and 
> pronunciation. 

Two interesting things about SSML (which used to be called Sable). One - 
there is almost no support for it amongst the commercial TTS packages. 
Two - even the people who wrote the SSML spec don't seem to have fully 
implemented it. The markup in most commercial TTS software is both 
proprietary and cranky.

> > And don't put down festival.  Many (most?) of the comercial systems
>
>> _are_ festival.
>
> I am not putting down Festival. However, I don't believe that many or 
> most commercial systems are based on Festival.

You are wrong. All the packages I know, except Eloquence and maybe 
RealSpeak, are based at some level on Festival. The ones derived from 
Naturally Speaking have most of the Festival directories still in place. 
Strange, but true.

Regards,
Steve