[gnuspeech-contact] introduction and gnuspeech questions

[Eric Zoerner]

I am looking at gnuspeech and am considering getting involved in the  
porting and/or development effort.  I am a postgraduate student at  
Trinity College, Dublin, doing a PhD in speech science.  I have 17  
years of commercial software engineering experience working in  
Smalltalk, Java, C/C++, et. al. on Unix/Linux and Mac platforms. I am  
potentially interested in working with gnuspeech to explore voice  
control in speech synthesis as my dissertation topic. I am being  
funded to do speech synthesis for the Irish language. While the  
primary effort at this point is for a unit concatenative voice,  I  
may also investigate what it would take to add synthesis for Irish to  
gnuspeech.

I have not yet downloaded the software from the cvs repository, but  
have been reading some of the documentation. I have just a couple of  
questions at this point for the development team. The platform I  
would be interested in running gnuspeech on and doing development on  
is Mac OS/X Tiger.

Questions:
- is it possible to generate audio output from gnuspeech on Mac OS/X  
at this point?
- Are there any sound files available that give samples of the speech  
output?
- Is it still possible to get the software/hardware necessary to run  
the full suite of gnuspeech (i.e. NEXTstep?)?

Thanks for any info you can provide.

Eric Zoerner
School of Linguistic,  Speech and Communication Sciences
Trinity College Dublin