eSpeak Features

[Tim Cross]

Jonathan Duddington writes:
 > On 07 Jan, Tim Cross <tcross at rapttech.com.au> wrote:
 > 
 > > Espeak is pretty good, but lacks some features and most of the rest
 > > are lacking in features, difficult to understand at high speech rates
 > > and not responsive enough. 
 > 
 > Which features does eSpeak lack?
 > Its synthesis method limits its speech quality, but perhaps I can add a
 > feature which is missing.

Hi Jonathan,

sorry for the delay in replying. After a number of people expressed how
satisfied they were with espeak, I thought I'd give it another try and
document what I found lacking with espeak. The last time I used it was a while
back. This was with both speech-dispatcher and emacspeak. 

On trying it again, I have found some problems, but have to admit the speech
quality is better than I remember it being a few years back. The other problem
I found now appear to be more with the clients than with the espeak system
i.e. libespeak itself. 

I am working on an x86_64 machine running Ubuntu Karmic. My preferred speech
system is emacspeak, but unfortunately, it seems that the emacspeak client for
espeak is possibly the worst of the client implementations. Under
speech-dispatcher, things seem better. 

Under emacspeak on a 64 bit system, the support for multiple voices (providing
voice locking) is pretty much unusable. Test is constantly being 'lost' i.e.
chopped off or just not spoken at all. Most chunks of speech have the last few
characters chopped off and sometimes, whole words. The 'gaps' between words
vary considerably and often things all just run in together. 

I've been looking at the code and comparing it to what is documented in the
libspeak header files and it looks like either the client is suffering form bit
rot and needs to be updated or it was just not well implemented in the first
place (or possibly a combination of both). 

Over the next few weeks, I plan to try and improve the situation as I'd rather
be evaluating espeak and not get misdirected by problems with the client's
use/implementation. This will be a bit of a struggle as I've not coded in C++
since 1994 and the language appears to have marched on considerably since
then! However, I'm confident I'll be able to get up to speed reasonably quickly.

I've posted this response to the list as I think its important to try and keep
the public record straight and I don't want to give misleading assessments of
espeak. However, I would appreciate it if I could email you directly should I
need some help with explinations or guidance on how to best use the library.
If there is an espeak specific dev list, that would be good (I didn't see
anythin on the espeak homepage). 

regards,

Tim


-- 
Tim Cross
tcross at rapttech.com.au

There are two types of people in IT - those who do not manage what they 
understand and those who do not understand what they manage.
-- 
Tim Cross
tcross at rapttech.com.au

There are two types of people in IT - those who do not manage what they 
understand and those who do not understand what they manage.