Emacspeak phrase breaks

["Bryan R. Smart" <bsmart@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I have written a speech server to interface Emacspeak to the Festival speech system.  While Festival is a more CPU intensive speech option than Freespeech/Mbrola, the Festival option seems more stable.  The Festival source is also freely available, and works on systems for which Mbrola binaries are not available (my workstation running Alpha Redhat Linux, for example).

 

The point of that is to introduce all of you to the situation before I pick your brains for tips :].

 

Raman, I'd like to know the thinking behind your strategy for breaking up chunks to be sent to the speech server.  Usually, I receive entire lines from Emacspeak, but I've noticed that chunks are separated into separate chunks when a "," is encountered.  Is this the only character?  Is there a variable that contains all of these characters?

 

I assumed that the reasoning behind this was that, as the DEC-talk pauses slightly between chunks, breaking chunks at commas would allow Emacspeak to produce smoother speech than would be had by passing chunks as lines (and having a break at the end of each line).  It seems, however, that Emacspeak usually passes entire lines as chunks, so I must not have the right idea regarding chunk breaking.

 

Also, is their a way that I can disable this feature?  Festival automagically examines a sentence's clause structure and punctuation in order to separate the material into reasonably sized chunks.  When Emacspeak is doing something similar, it creates more utterances (chunks of spoken material) than is reasonable.

 

If the behavior of the Emacsspeak chunking is modifiable, it might be more reasonable to have long blocks of material sent as sentences.  That would allow Festival's advanced modules to do a more efficient job of TTS than they are able to do at the moment.

 

Thanks in advance for any help.  Some small modifications to Festival and organizing text into usable chunks are the only obstacles that remain.  Alan Black is helping with the speed tweaking, and I hope to come up with some solutions to the chunking problem here.

 

Best,

Bryan