How to get Festival text to speech working?

[Marko Vojinovic]

On Monday 30 July 2007 15:07, Tim wrote:
> Rudolf Kastl:
> >>> personally i found that http://espeak.sourceforge.net/ is already
> >>> much more versatile.
>
> Tim:
> >> Hmm, neither this, nor Festival, sound as good as the speak device on
> >> the Amiga (from the mid 1980s).  That's a bit surprising, I'd have
> >> thought that it'd be vastly outperformed, by now.
>
> Ed Greshko:
> > Is this observation from memory or do you have an Amiga running today and
> > are making an actual comparison?  Just wondering.
>
> The Amiga's speech sounds quite like Steven Hawking's speech synth, not
> to mention a few other speech synths used by the disabled.  That'll give
> a few more people an idea what it sounds like, seeing as it pops up in
> movies and television.  I couldn't easily drag mine out and sample it,
> for quite some time, it's buried amongst the rest of my clutter.

I still have a working Amiga on my desk. If enough people are interested, I 
just might be able to record a couple of sentences (though it would require 
some cablework). What is the easiest way to record sound in Fedora (with the 
Sound Blaster Live card)?

> While it doesn't sound very polished, it is quite understandable, and
> handled most words and sentences fairly appropriately (changing pitch,
> and pausing, where it should, etc.).

Yup, in those days I was amazed that in piched up on a comma and down on a 
period. A machine with 512 KB memory, booted from a floppy disk... I've never 
heard of any PC talking so good. Otoh, I have yet to hear the Festival... :-)

Best, :-)
Marko

Marko Vojinovic
Institute of Physics
University of Belgrade
======================
e-mail: vmarko at phy.bg.ac.yu