TTS voices project

[Jonathan Duddington]

In article <457425F5.1010501 at ubuntu.com>,
   Henrik Nilsen Omma <henrik at ubuntu.com> wrote:

> I'd like to propose a new Ubuntu Accessibility project aimed at
> creating Text To Speech voices (or helping to improve existing ones).

Thanks.
I've recently added (very) "Preliminary" data for some new languages to
eSpeak:
  Hindi, Swedish, Vietnamese.

As usual, without feedback from native speakers these will be rubbish,
but they are there if someone wants to work on them.

> Most of this work does not involve programming or audio mixing, but
> merely altering language definition files.

That's partly true.  If the language includes certain sounds that
aren't currently supported (usually consonants), then audio editing or
programing work may also be needed.

> - This represents a fairly simple non-coding way of contributing to 
> Ubuntu Accessibility So if you can spare some time but don't do 
> programming this is a great way to contribute!

> - Local promotion -- It would be much easier to promote Ubuntu and
> Free Software to local visual impairment communities if we had
> native speech support. In places where commercial offerings are poor
> it's a killer feature!

Yes.  The open source method seems well suited for people to customize
software for their own language, both user translation and speech
synthesis.  For example, I'm told that there is no commercial
text-to-speech for Afrikaans.

The question is how to find people who are interested in helping. I'm
anxious to get any feedback that might give me a clue about how to
improve a language.

I posted a message on the Ubuntu Translators list a few weeks ago, but
it didn't get any response.