Festival vs. F-lite file sizes (installed)

[Milan Zamazal]

>>>>> "HNO" == Henrik Nilsen Omma <henrik at ubuntu.com> writes:

    HNO> For some reason it was assumed that Festival would require 40MB
    HNO> of installed space, while F-lite would only require
    HNO> 8MB. However, it turned out that F-lite was not supported
    HNO> directly by gnome-speech and so we needed to add
    HNO> speech-dispatcher to make it work. Unfortunately, this takes
    HNO> the total to 17MB.

On Debian, the following applies:

- libflite1 is 13 MB.

- Flite and Speech Dispatcher itself are small, but they both depend on
  libflite1.

- AFAIK Speech Dispatcher needs only libflite1, not flite itself.

- libflite1 contains several voices.  If only one 8 kHz voice was
  retained, its size would reduce to about 5 MB.

- AFAIK you don't have to install both Speech Dispatcher and flite --
  libflite1 does all what's needed for Speech Dispatcher.

- 8 MB may be size of plain Festival without any voices.

- 8 kHz Festival English diphone voices are about 3 MB each, 16kHz
  diphone voices are about 6 MB each.

So flite can indeed be about 8 MB, Festival can require about 12 MB with
a single 8kHz voice or about 15 MB with a single 16 kHz voice.

Festival is much more customizable and supports several languages.

Using Speech Dispatcher only because it supports flite is not a very
good idea IMHO.  Speech Dispatcher is about managing speech messages,
but GNOME technologies currently don't use its advantages at all (there
is a full featured Speech Dispatcher Emacs client and Speech Dispatcher
support for Speakup).

Regards,

Milan Zamazal