Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[mcewanw]

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]

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]

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]

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]

Anyway rto attach this to emacspeak?

[jemimah]

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

[abushcrafter]

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]

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]

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

[amigo]

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...

[mcewanw]

flite_hts_engine is a reasonably good quality Text To Speech (TTS) synthesiser in an incredibly small package considering it includes the voice data (approx 1.6MB download).

New version (deb package for DebianDog and dotpet for Puppy), that seems to have fixed the problem of occasional garbled text can be downloaded, for now at least, from the first post of this thread.

William

[greengeek]

Thanks William - I've just tried the dotpet and it works well on my slacko 5.6 derivative. Seems to respond well to commas and fullstops too. Here is my sample:

[mcewanw]

Thanks, greengeek - you post interesting examples and observations regarding the subtleties of using flite_hts_engine.

As I mentioned in my first thread post, you may also find the project http://mage.numediart.org/ of interest. Mage is easy to compile (in DebianDog at least - it uses cmake rather than make during compilation) and is nicely described in a number of videos on its website. I have compiled Mage on my computer and am working on it just now. Hope to provide some useful dotpet/deb eventually for that too, but early days, so don't know if I will succeed or if too much work involved. The Mage videos are worth a look though, since show future possibilities surrounding some of the research going on out there.

William

EDIT: The required build system proved too large for the resources my machine has... Also the HTS code in Mage doesn't seem to be used or immediately usable with a realtime TTS like flite, as far as I could determine. Best I managed was to use its HTS batch binary to create a wav file from a provided .lab text file. Wasn't a particularly interesting exercise; flite_hts_engine appears to be more appropriate for practical use in Puppy as things are at the moment.

[Flash]

Sounds a lot better if you put hyphens like this:

[sunburnt]

Very nice William, this is something to inspire most anyone.

I`m thinking BaCon maybe able to help if the output is a problem.