changing voice with festival

[Matthew Miller]

On Sat, Jul 02, 2005 at 03:59:31PM -0300, Mariano Draghi wrote:
> I think the FC4 RPM just have the "core" of festival, without any of the 
> other tools (extra voices, spanish support, etc).

Actually, we ship everything that is under free license except for the
"multisyn" voices which are over 100MB each. Unfortunately for you, the
Spanish voices aren't an option -- nor are the British ones. This leaves us
with:

 voice_kal_diphone:           US English male
 voice_ked_diphone:           US English male
 voice_cmu_us_awb_arctic_hts: Scottish English male (using US English)
 voice_cmu_us_bdl_arctic_hts: US English male      
 voice_cmu_us_jmk_arctic_hts: Candian English male (using US English)
 voice_cmu_us_slt_arctic_hts: US English female

To change the default, simply put

  (set! voice_default 'voice_cmu_us_slt_arctic_hts)

in ~/.festivalrc.

You can test the various voices by running festival from the command line
-- type "help" and you'll get some quick instructions on what to do.

I'm not a text-to-speech expert -- I just like my computer to talk. The
"arctic_hts" voices sound *much* better than the diphone ones. And my
favorite is voice_cmu_us_slt_arctic_hts, but that just may be because Star
Trek has conditioned me into believing that computers should speak with
female voices.

Again, if you know of anything else that we can include, please let me know!


-- 
Matthew Miller           mattdm at mattdm.org        <http://www.mattdm.org/>
Boston University Linux      ------>                <http://linux.bu.edu/>
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