dtk-soft

["T. V. Raman" <raman@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

the sluggishness is probably a debian issue as with the rest of the
problems in the past, at least I dont see it, and my home machine is a
400mhz celeron.

The softness of the volume is somethiing I reported  over a year ago
and is a known issue with the current set of voices they use.
Simplest fix for now may be to just create the auditory icon files
with the volume turned down so things match.
>>>>> "Tim" == Tim Cross <tcross@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

    Tim> I was just wondering what others thought of the software
    Tim> dectalk synth? My initial feeling is that its OK, but it
    Tim> seems to be a bit sluggish. When typing, it doesn't echo
    Tim> characters unless you type very slowly. I also find its
    Tim> volume is very low. If you want to run both auditory icons
    Tim> and dtk-soft, you either have to accept icons being very loud
    Tim> or dtk-soft being very low - though I'm going to experiment
    Tim> and see if I can find a way of adjusting this.

    Tim> I was wondeirng if anyone else had notice the sluggishness -
    Tim> its possible I might be able to improve performance with some
    Tim> irq tweaking etc.

    Tim> Apart from that, I think it looks quite promising and cold be
    Tim> a viable alternative to viavoice which is no longer being
    Tim> developed for Linux. I suspect that very soon more and more
    Tim> people will have trouble running viavoice as the libraries
    Tim> become outdated. This is a great pity, as I personally find
    Tim> the quality of the voice in outloud very good. I don't know
    Tim> why viavoice is able to get such good voice synthesis
    Tim> compared to the software dectalk or festival and do it at a
    Tim> good speed. It wold be interesting to know, but I guess thats
    Tim> probably proprietary knowledge which is guarded very closely.

    Tim> I plan to look more deeply into this stuff and try my hand at
    Tim> creating some voices with festvox - apparently there is a bit
    Tim> of an art to it and possibly thats the main difference
    Tim> between these software synthesizes.

    Tim> Anyway, for $50US, I think the software dectalk is worth the
    Tim> investment. I think if you feel you can afford this
    Tim> investment, it would be good to purchase the dectalk software
    Tim> to support its Linux development and possibly ensure we have
    Tim> a resonably priced software speech synth for linux which is
    Tim> of good quality and continues to be supported.

    Tim> Perhaps with more users and some good feedback, we can work
    Tim> out how to improve the responsiveness of the dtk-soft driver
    Tim> (or maybe the sluggishness is just down to my Debian
    Tim> installation and there are still some problems which will not
    Tim> be present on other distributions or in a more stable Debian
    Tim> one in the future?). let me know if you find your
    Tim> installation responsive enough to echo letters as you type
    Tim> them at a normal/acceptable rate.

    Tim> One thing I was happy with is that the dtk-soft driver does
    Tim> not seem to stop working as often as the outloud driver
    Tim> does. While the problem of the outloud driver failing to
    Tim> respond does seem to be less if you have a fast cpu and a
    Tim> good amount of memory, it still dies quite often and needs to
    Tim> be restarted. However, in the few hours I've been using the
    Tim> dtk-soft, it has not died on me once, even when doing those
    Tim> things which would almost guarantee outloud would die
    Tim> (sending lots of data very quickly etc).

    Tim> Today I have also had a look at both festival and eflite. I
    Tim> think both offer some potential. I have not tried flite with
    Tim> 16k voices yet, but will give that a try in the next few
    Tim> weeks. The quality of the festival voices has certainly
    Tim> improved since the last time I checked it out a few years ago
    Tim> and it will be interesting to see what potential it has.

    Tim> Tim

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-- 
Best Regards,
--raman

      
Email:  raman@xxxxxxxxxxx
WWW: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/raman/             
AIM: TVRaman
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