update needed on software synthesizers for linux

Hynek Hanke hanke at volny.cz
Fri Feb 10 13:21:30 UTC 2006


> I have used flite and eflite with yasr and am not satisfied with the
> speach output.  if there are no free software synthes available then
> what are the other options.

Hello,

definitely Festival is a better Free Software synthesizers than Flite.
Some people continue to use Flite because it's faster on older machines,
I think. But apart from that (and apart from embedded devices,
which is not the case we are talking about here), there is little
reason to use Flite over Festival.

Festival has many advantages: 1) it's extensible 2) is as fast as Flite
on most todays machines and when interfaced properly 3) supports more
languages (lately it seems more and more people are working on support
for European languages).

As for the quality of speech, you can hook into any part of the
synthesis process and do what you want, so in theory you can do much
to improve quality. Apart from the diphone approach, there is also a
multisyn voice for English.

I think you should contact Milan Zamazal (pdm at brailcom dot org).
He has recently developed a Czech GPL voice for Festival (using FestVox)
here in Brailcom. This included both the TTS processing and diphone
database. I think he was also thinking about the multisyn approach, but
we didn't find enough resources to be able to work on this. Also, the
multisyn approach has some drawbacks for accessibility. He is happy
to answer questions and provide help to other people working on
new voices for Festival.

Have a nice day,
Hynek




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