Christian Hudon wrote:
>
> On Tuesday, June 02, Marc Lepage wrote
> > What are some good text to speech packages for Linux? Assume only a
> > SoundBlaster for hardware (ie, no dedicated TTS hardware).
>
> If you're using emacs, I saw a few emacsspeak packages fly by on the
> debian-devel-changes mailing-list recently. You might want to look into
> those. They should get installed into unstable soon. If not, just grab them
> from an Incoming mirror.
>
> I Hope that helps,
>
> Christian
I believe Emacspeak only works with hardware, such as DECtalk.
I have compiled Festival myself, to support 16-bit linux16audio (/dev/dsp). It
only supports one audio device, and it appears that the .deb I had used is
compiled to support 8-bit sunaudio (/dev/audio). That has improved the sound.
I also have set up the rb_mbrola voice, which apparently is the best. It
requires the MBROLA synthesizer and one of its voices.
Together, those changes have produced a TTS system which I must say is quite
good. I have heard 3 hardware TTS systems, and this software-only solution is
comparable. I see it trips on a few words ("poison" sometimes throws it for a
total loop, screwing up the entire sentence) but all in all it is adequate.
[I had it read this message, and from "poison" to "adequate" was not read.]
I have installed festival.el into XEmacs. I don't get the menus, but I have
bound the functions to function keys, and so can TTS regions and buffers. I will
investigate into using Emacspeak with Festival. The festival.el package is far
too rudimentary to be used as a screen reader, although it may provide the basis
for creating one.
--
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Homepage: http://www.cgocable.net/~mlepage/
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