flite_hts_engine: at last, good quality Puppy speech

[mcewanw]

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

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

Hi Terry,

Yes, a bit pre-processing of the input text can work wonders. However, depends to some extent on a person's cultural background which voices they consider more realistic or better sounding. Here in New Zealand, for example, people speak English with very clipped short vowels, whereas, in Scotland, where I come from, long vowels are the norm! So when a Kiwi (i.e. New Zealander) says 'cat' it sounds something like 'cut' to my ears, and when I say 'cat', I imagine it sounds like 'caaat' to theirs! (And when they say 'sex' it sounds like 'six' to me, so I often misunderstand their jokes and humour! More worrying is the probability that when I say 'six' they probably think I'm saying 'sex'...)

By the way, I now have a version of DebianDog as a full install on a usb stick set up basically as a development environment. For the moment its purpose is to allow me to check out different program enviroments I'm interested in, so the usb stick currently includes Lazarus (with free Pascal), openframeworks (C++ framework) and I've just finished compiling BaCon from sources. Of course the first two, create pretty big executables compared to BaCon, there being lots of overhead from dependencies loaded by the frameworks themselves. For Lazarus, a stripped executable of around 3 MB or more can be expected, but the programming environment is like Delphi and very nice to use. BaCon can clearly produces much much tinier GUI executables comparatively, though not as small I think as straight C with gtk+ calls (xhippo GUI executable, for example, is under 50kB). However, executable size is less important to me nowadays than RAM usage and ease of creation... Whilst gtkdialog based scripts are tiny, the RAM used by gtkdialog is really quite substantial and a good BaCon or straight C/gtk_ program can probably do much better in many cases.

One of the many great things about DebianDog is just how easy it is to install these kind of programming frameworks - leaves more time for actually playing with them! :-)

Almost summer here though, so truth is I'm not at the computer quite as much at the moment, but looking forward to at last trying out BaCon.

William

[sunburnt]

Hey William; Sounds like you`re really fine tuning your dev environment.
Yes BaCon entails a small overhead when using HUG for GTK windows.
And BaCon itself is not quite as efficient as C itself of course, but close.
The exec. files are largish, but I have a compile command that helps.
And using upx on the final exec. files really brings them down to normal.

Remember to download hug.bac from the BaCon home page for GTK stuff.
And get BaCon and HUG html docs, I made text versions so no browser.

I keep the BaCon files in /media/sda3/BaCon/BaCon
And make links for /bacon and /hug.bac in: /usr/share/Bacon/
This way we don`t have Puppy`s problem of loosing everything with an
inevitable Save file corruption, same thing relocatable apps give us.

Keep all apps, media, and docs outside of the Save file on a real drive.

Yeah, DebianDog sure makes things easy that I struggled with in Puppy.
And the changeover learning curve was not all that bad ( multiuser ).
My time has been rather limited, but I`m hoping to get back at all of this.

What are your plans for BaCon? I`ll help and the forum guys are great.!
Good to talk to you William, keep the projects coming.!
.