TTS voices project

[Jan Claeys]

Op dinsdag 05-12-2006 om 14:11 uur [tijdzone +0000], schreef Jonathan
Duddington:
> In article <1165326418.31269.540.camel at localhost>,
>    Jan Claeys <lists at janc.be> wrote:
> 
> > Unfortunately, it seems like eSpeak only (tries to) use OSS.
> 
> Text-to-speech is basically a function that translates input data
> (text) into output data (sound waveform).  How to play that sound on
> the computer is a different problem, and one that varies depending on
> the operating environment.
> 
> I used the PortAudio library because it claims to be platform
> independent.  I believe that version 19 of PortAudio uses ALSA.

But Ubuntu 6.10 ("edgy") uses PortAudio version 18 (not surprising, as
judging from the PortAudio site, version 19 isn't "stable" yet?).

> I'm not sure how these things work on Ubuntu, but I expect it's a
> similar situation.  eSpeak can either pass the speech data back to a
> calling program by writing it to a WAV file

Yeah, that works (I'd already tried that), but it's quite awkward if you
want to listen to several texts (well, I could write a script that uses
a temporary file etc., but I think you understand what I mean).

> or its stdout.  I think SpeechDispatcher does this.

If I could find what format stdout is in (I didn't read *all* the docs
yet), so that I can go searching for a program that can take this on
stdin and play it... (it seems like 'aplay' can't, or I don't know the
correct options?).


-- 
Jan Claeys