[g-a-devel] Happy patch bonanza

[Enrico Zini]

On Wed, Jun 28, 2006 at 09:22:41PM +0200, Hynek Hanke wrote:

> if you use festival-freebsoft-utils to communicate with Festival, then
> you can send all the input in UTF-8 through the appropriate functions
> and let Festival care about the necessary conversions between encodings.
> Encodings can be easily defined by the user in the configuration file,
> or can be specified by the author of the voice, as is the case with
> festival-czech. It has a dependency on the 'recode' utility.

The gnome-speech festival driver just runs "festival -server" and then
communicates with it on port 1314.  I don't know how much effort it will
be to convert it to use festival-freebsoft-utils, also because there
seems to be a general consensus in moving away from gnome-speech.  From
what I understand it's currently fine to make fixes to gnome-speech, but
a bit too late to do major redesigns.

BTW, I now realise that by the time the Italian Festival voice can
understand UTF-8, we'll definitely have moved away from gnome-speech,
and since a long time, too.


> If you want to go some other way, I'd highly recommend that the encoding
> used for different voices is easily configurable by the user. I think
> there is no way how to determine the encoding of a given voice in
> Festival automatically (which is of course broken :( ), so giving the
> user the power to fix the problem without recompiling anything is very
> important.

Good point.  So, either there's a way to query the preferred encoding to
the festival voice, then we should use it.  Otherwise, it should all be
read from some external config and not compiled in.

There's also a way halfway through, that is adding to the Italian speech
synthesis LISP commands to let gnome-speech know of the encoding, or to
do the transcoding.  I unfortunately don't know enough of Festival to be
able to do that.  Maybe the festival developers can help here?


Ciao,

Enrico

-- 
GPG key: 1024D/797EBFAB 2000-12-05 Enrico Zini <enrico at debian.org>
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