Re: New speech speed-up library available under GPL

  • From: Alex Midence <alex.midence@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Wed, 10 Nov 2010 00:13:06 -0600

I kept it nice and simple.  In virtual console running speak-up
(emacspeak is horrid wihtin gnome!  Won't play nice with Orca and all
that.)  I did the following all on one line, mind:

sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get install sonic; sudo apt-get install
espeak; sudo restorespeech

Then, sudo apt-update; sudo apt-get emacspeak

I just told it to use espeak as the default and answered subsequent
prompts for the server with none.

When the thing finally came up for air after all that, it worked like
acharm.  Let me back up by saying that I've gone through a couple
virtual machines already where I had to delete them from hard disk
because of something or other I did.  Each time, I would try and get
emacspeak up and tinker with it a bit so, those commands were products
of trial and error.  When I get to tinkering I have a nasty tendency
to break things very very thoroughly.  Anyway, I'd previously just had
emacspeak running withespeak 1.3 and had the cutout problem.  Sonic
helped a little though it first felt like an engine running out of
gas.  It would speed up then slow down a bit and then speed back up
again.  When I first ran update to get the upgraded espeak, I noticed
immediate improvements with orca.  Sonic appears to work best with
espeak 1.4.  Without it, espeak is a bit clearer but can't seem to
respond to stomping on the proverbial gas.  Speak-up also showed a
marked improvement and more seamless integration/utillization of the
new libraries.  Then, I crossed my fingers, killed speak-up with the
print screen key and typed emacspeak.  All was well with the world.
Well,  Till I took it into my head to add festival to orca and broke
my vinux and had to rebuild.  This last time though, I just entered
the command line commands I listed above from the start and have been
enjoying clarity and warp speed.  Well, except that .. I just broke
the damn thing again but this time, it was not my fault!  Honest!
VMware tools appears to choke orca at start up when the machine is
rebooted but that is for another topic on another list.  Reason I'm so
excited about emacspeak is that I want to use it as my ide in linux
since Code::blocks, the ide I use in windows doesn't have an
accessible version in the ubuntu repositories.  Emacspeak being
emacspeak, I wanted to give it a really good try.  Since the speech
improvements, I've been making considerable probress since the thing
just ... works!  I won't be buying voxin until I am in a position to
put vinux directly onto a hard drive as sole OS for a dedicated
machine.  Besides, Espeak grows on you after a bit and there really
ought to be a way to run emacspeak with it so you don't have to cough
up any money for it if you're just getting started with it and you
don't want the poor performance of eflite.   Bottom line, espeak 1.4
wouldn't have done it alone and sonic wouldn't have done it alone.
Looks like it was a bit of a combination.  The irony is, you weren't
really targetting emacspeak this time around.   Nice side effect, I
must say.

Sorry about the disjointed nature of the message.  I've had just far
too much caffine (pulling all-nighter for school) Mind's going a
thousand miles a minute right now and I'm multitasking.  Geology
homework.  Boring as two hells.  I mean, rocks, who wants to know
anything about rocks?  You throw them, miss what you were aiming at
because you can't see it, swear, and them move on and live the rest of
life.  Apparently, there's more to it.

Alex M



On 11/9/10, Bill Cox <waywardgeek@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Wow, that's great!  I've been hacking both espeak and
> speech-dispatcher to try and integrate it, but it's taking me longer
> than I'd thought it would.  Did you integrate directly into espeak, or
> some other part of the emacspeak sound stack?
>
> As for NVDA, when Alex or I finish integration with espeak, it will
> hopefully only be a matter of time before it shows up in NVDA.
>
> As for speeding up certain vowels vs certain consonants, sonic doesn't
> do any of that.  In fact, one of the reasons I prefer espeak with
> sonic speed up is that espeak does try to play with ratios of silence
> and some sounds as you go faster, and it makes espeak sound worse,
> IMO.  If you train to understand a synth at high speed, your ear will
> eventually correct for the problems that we all hear initially in high
> speed speech.
>
> The best example is Eloquence.  I have long wondered what magical
> algorithms they used to make it sound so good at high speed.  The
> answer is... nothing!  When I speed up normal speed Eloquence, it
> sounds almost identical to what Eloquence generates directly at high
> speed.  This shows that Eloquence is not fine tuning speech as it
> plays faster... it simply plays faster!  Actually, they probably did
> tune it a lot to work well at high speed, but all that tuning applies
> to speech at all rates.
>
> So, if you've ever wondered who the fastest speed listener in the
> world is, I can tell you.  It's Sina, at least for now.  I know that
> because even Eloquence has a fastest rate - 100%.  We've sped up some
> Eloquence samples generated at default speed, and Sina can comprehend
> them well past the 100% speed.
>
> Bill
>
> On Tue, Nov 9, 2010 at 1:37 PM, Alex Midence <alex.midencu@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> He succeeded wonderfully.  Even got emacspeak with espeak to work
>> without chopping off the ends of syllables in links and line endings.
>> Also can navigate by char now.  In orca and speak-up, espeak now
>> sounds fluid when sped up to about 300 words per minute.  As for the
>> clarity of it or the asthetics of the voice, it is still espeak.  It
>> doesn't sound as nice as eloquence or dectalk or anything like that
>> but, it's free and its fast and it works just fine.  Nice work, Bill.
>>
>> Alex M
>>
>> On 11/9/10, Ken Perry <whistler@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>> I think Bill is applying this library to the speech dispatcher so that
>>> should take care of making speeding up espeak sound better.
>>>
>>> Ken
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
>>> [mailto:programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Homme, James
>>> Sent: Tuesday, November 09, 2010 7:01 AM
>>> To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
>>> Subject: RE: New speech speed-up library available under GPL
>>>
>>> Hi,
>>> It would be wonderful if someone would have a look at Espeak. I don't
>>> know
>>> C, so I can't help with that project.
>>>
>>> Jim
>>>
>>> Jim Homme,
>>> Usability Services,
>>> Phone: 412-544-1810. Skype: jim.homme
>>> Internal recipients,  Read my accessibility blog. Discuss accessibility
>>> here. Accessibility Wiki: Breaking news and accessibility advice
>>>
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
>>> [mailto:programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Bill Cox
>>> Sent: Monday, November 08, 2010 7:40 PM
>>> To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
>>> Subject: Re: New speech speed-up library available under GPL
>>>
>>> Hi, Stefik.  There aren't any tutorials yet.  The project is too new.
>>> I'm currently hacking it into speech-dispatcher to enable Linux users
>>> to enjoy it.
>>>
>>> I do believe it will be useful in a lot of places.  Mainly, I was
>>> worried that excellent TTS systems like Eloquence are slowly going
>>> away, leaving people with vision impairments with only slow natural
>>> speech TTS systems.  Now I feel that problem is solved, as we can
>>> speed up any natural TTS system and I think achieve very high
>>> listening rates.  I've been testing my friends and family (they think
>>> I'm weird, but that's nothing new).  My family can listen from 2.5X to
>>> 3X faster than recorded without training, and my old school friend can
>>> listen at 3.5X speed up.  I can listen at about 4X, but I've been
>>> training to speed-listen for over a year.  All of us can listen to
>>> real voices at faster rates than we can alisten to Eloquence.  This
>>> leads me to be hopeful about the future of TTS.
>>>
>>> Bill
>>>> Any tutorials available for how you would use it with various existing
>>>> speech architectures? This sounds like a useful project.
>>>>
>>>> Stefik
>>>>
>>>> On Mon, Nov 8, 2010 at 3:36 PM, Alex Midence <alex.midence@xxxxxxxxx>
>>> wrote:
>>>>> On 11/4/10, Bill Cox <waywardgeek@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>>>>> I've release a new very simple library for speeding up or slowing down
>>>>>> speech.  It's primary strength is high quality at greater than 2X
>>>>>> speed up.  The code can be checked out with:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> $ git clone git://vinux-project.org/sonic
>>>>>>
>>>>>> There are speech samples in the samples directory.  The primary
>>>>>> motivation for this library is to enable low speed speech synthesizers
>>>>>> to play at high speed with high quality.  My hope is that many will be
>>>>>> as easy to comprehend as Eloquence, giving us a lot more options in
>>>>>> high speed TTS.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Bill
>>>>>> __________
>>>>>> View the list's information and change your settings at
>>>>>> //www.freelists.org/list/programmingblind
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>> __________
>>>>> View the list's information and change your settings at
>>>>> //www.freelists.org/list/programmingblind
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>> __________
>>>> View the list's information and change your settings at
>>>> //www.freelists.org/list/programmingblind
>>>>
>>>>
>>> __________
>>> View the list's information and change your settings at
>>> //www.freelists.org/list/programmingblind
>>>
>>>
>>> This e-mail and any attachments to it are confidential and are intended
>>> solely for use of the individual or entity to whom they are addressed.
>>>  If
>>> you have received this e-mail in error, please notify the sender
>>> immediately
>>> and then delete it.  If you are not the intended recipient, you must not
>>> keep, use, disclose, copy or distribute this e-mail without the author's
>>> prior permission.  The views expressed in this e-mail message do not
>>> necessarily represent the views of Highmark Inc., its subsidiaries, or
>>> affiliates.
>>> __________
>>> View the list's information and change your settings at
>>> //www.freelists.org/list/programmingblind
>>>
>>> __________
>>> View the list's information and change your settings at
>>> //www.freelists.org/list/programmingblind
>>>
>>>
>> __________
>> View the list's information and change your settings at
>> //www.freelists.org/list/programmingblind
>>
>>
> __________
> View the list's information and change your settings at
> //www.freelists.org/list/programmingblind
>
>
__________
View the list's information and change your settings at 
//www.freelists.org/list/programmingblind

Other related posts: