Re: Is there a program that will help you create Sapi5 voices?

  • From: "John Greer" <jpgreer17@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Tue, 9 Oct 2007 04:23:56 -0500

To have more than one SAPI 5 voice speak at once you have to use the Set 
Priorety flag.  It is also possible to change the pitch for a SAPI 5 voice, it 
is just that most SAPI5 voices use concatnative sound samples to produce the 
words, and changing the pitch of the sound samples becomes artifacty.  I 
realize it is an extremely hard thing to read through but the SAPI 5.1 SDK help 
documentation does explain many of these things.  Eloquence is a SAPI voice 
only because it uses the SAPI interface to create the speech bridge.  But in 
that case, it is possible to create a self contained dll, much like they have 
also done with E Speak for NVDA.  E Speak is also a SAPI 5 voice.  Narrator is 
not a good example to go by in the case of good SAPI implementation, nor is the 
speech control panel because it does not use the speech priorety flags.  The 
diference as far as responsiveness comes also by the method the voice is 
synthesized.  Three voices to compare are Scansoft voices, E Speak and the 
standard microsoft voices.  Believe it or not the microsoft voices when 
programmed for correctly are quite responsive, and for some reason, Freedom 
Scientific has never figured out how to do this.  In fact it wasn't until 
version 8 that they finally figured out how to compensate for the sample 
frequency differential that SAPI 5 voices have.  Now in the case of the 
Scansoft voices, those voices are true recorded speech, so by nature they are 
going to be slower because, in order to produce words it has to be able to 
parse words, and compare it to its phonetic dictionary, then access the hard 
drive to load the correct sound samples and put them together into words.  The 
larger the sound sample library the voice has the slower the response becomes.  
In the case of E Speak it is also sampled speech, but most of its processing is 
actually done through a backend synthesizer sort of like what is done with the 
microsoft voices.  How responsive a voice is does not really depend on whether 
it is SAPI 5 or not, it depends on what method is used to synthesize the voice 
and also how well done the voice coding actually is.
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Octavian Rasnita 
  To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx 
  Sent: Tuesday, October 09, 2007 12:38 AM
  Subject: Re: Is there a program that will help you create Sapi5 voices?


  Does anyone know what interface is used by Eloquence?

  It is not SAPI 4 nor 5, and it works better than a SAPI voice.

  The problem with the SAPI voices is that at a certain moment only a single 
SAPI5 voice can be active, and in order to change the voice we need to go into 
Control Panel/Speech, and changing the active voice there doesn't always work.
  For example, I've tried to use ESpeak sinthesizer, and I couldn't make it 
active but only by deleting all others voices from the Registry.
  And this was a problem also because Narrator doesn't work without those MS 
made voices.

  Does anyone know some books or tutorials for working with these things under 
Windows? But of course, not MSDN, because it refers only to ways of creating 
sinthesizers which are not used by any good company that creates sinthesizers. 
Information about creating sinthesizers that work under Symbian are also 
welcome.

  Octavian

    ----- Original Message ----- 
    From: inthaneelf 
    To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx 
    Sent: Monday, October 08, 2007 11:41 PM
    Subject: Re: Is there a program that will help you create Sapi5 voices?


    as an extra idea, you may want to go back to 
    SAPI 4, and research both at MS, and on the web, (added note, if you don't 
get it on Google, try web crawler, more than once, if I couldn't find it on 
Google, I found it with a web crawler search)



    there seems to have been more available for 

    SAPI 4 and it's agents, which might give you clues on how to approach it in 

    SAPI 5.  



    just a thought for you folks, 

    inthane 

    . For Blind Programming assistance, Information, Useful Programs, and Links 
to Jamal Mazrui's Text tutorial packages and Applications, visit me at:
    http://grabbag.alacorncomputer.com
    . to be able to view a simple programming project in several programming 
languages, visit the Fruit basket demo site at:
    http://fruitbasketdemo.alacorncomputer.com

      ----- Original Message ----- 
      From: black ares 
      To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx 
      Sent: Monday, October 08, 2007 2:40 AM
      Subject: Re: Is there a program that will help you create Sapi5 voices?


      ehe!
      it is not so easy even you want to make a concatenated voice not a 
formant one...
      I am trying now to understand how to make a voice for the language from 
my country
      I search for documentation, but it seems that this is a taboo subject 
because I didn't find nothing how to code speach.

        ----- Original Message ----- 
        From: alex 
        To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx 
        Sent: Saturday, October 06, 2007 1:09 AM
        Subject: Is there a program that will help you create Sapi5 voices?


        Well I was wondering, 
        Is there a program that will help you create Sapi5 voices?

        Like something that you speak a number of letters into a microphone 
then it gets an understanding of your voice and creates a sapi5 engine out of 
it?

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