Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

mcewanw · Joined: 16 Aug 2007 Posts: 1482 Location: New Zealand

Changes: Fixed scripts to allow wav output.

This version of flite_hts_engine writes to either wav or to stdout (allows direct pipe to aplay; no fifo required)

amigo · Joined: 02 Apr 2007 Posts: 1759

Great work William -no problem about the diff. I appreciate the fine work that you have done in the past and on this.

Text has to be 'vetted' for use by flite and other t2s programs as they don't always know what to do. Text with formatting like:
##########
==========
underscores and other special chars will not be read pleasantly at all.

mcewanw · Joined: 16 Aug 2007 Posts: 1482 Location: New Zealand

flite_hts_engine sometimes gets oddly muddled. Try these two simple examples. On my machine at least, the second example flops...

flitet "Here is the new thread" | aplay

flitet "Here is the new thread and" | aplay

A long text always contains such difficulties here and there which flite_hts_engine makes a mess off. Otherwise it is great; if only it was consistent in that sense!

amigo · Joined: 02 Apr 2007 Posts: 1759

I've been looking at my flite sources again. I had forgotten that I had found a file called speak.c on the net a long time ago, which someone had written to read a file line-by-line using flite. Actually, the program links in the flite libs so it is standalone. Anyway, it may be a good candidate to do the same with flite_hts_engine.

I'll post it tomorrow after working out (again) the details of how to use it. I had built flite and speak using 'diet' or uClibc, so the build recipe needs to be re-worked for using glibc.

I also was looking at the full sources for flite -especially the built-in sound server/client bits. It might not be too hard to build this into flite_hts and thereby reduce some of the latency of starting aplay each time.

Trobin · Joined: 18 Aug 2005 Posts: 872 Location: BC Canada

Anyway rto attach this to emacspeak?

jemimah · Joined: 26 Aug 2009 Posts: 4309 Location: Tampa, FL

Here is a gtkdialog frontend for flite. It takes an argument for the filename too, so you can use it with RoxRightClicks.

abushcrafter · Joined: 30 Oct 2009 Posts: 1447 Location: England

There's a new version out. Could you package it up please? Could you also slow down the speed at which it talks? With the current package, I find it is stumbling on a 1mb text file. Is that buffer size issues? In which case can you give the new version (If you package it up.) a larger buffer please. Thanks so far.

I have attached a bug fix of jemimah's gtkdialog frontend for flite.

amigo · Joined: 02 Apr 2007 Posts: 1759

Yes, there is a new version of flite available. It now comes with three or four voices which you can choose from using command-line options Yeah! The female voice seems to be the most natural sounding.

jemimah · Joined: 26 Aug 2009 Posts: 4309 Location: Tampa, FL

I don't think flite-hts-engine has been updated - the regular flite is much larger.

amigo · Joined: 02 Apr 2007 Posts: 1759

You are correct jemimah, flite-hts-engine has not been updated. The flite API has changed, so flite-hts-engine it may or may not adapt to the new API. flite-hts-engine has much better voice quality, but there are problems with it garbling some texts, and flite-hts can only read fairly short texts.

I've just found something new called svox-pico which is used on the Android platform. There is a pico2wave utility(if you use the ubuntu sources) which provides several very nice voices to choose from. Problem is it only outputs a *.wav file. Maybe one of us can figure out how to get it use stdout, or some audio lib to output sound directly...

I'm still searching for something light and usable...