User Feedback :: Thanks DSL for one great year..

Quote (ke4nt1 @ Oct. 29 2004,22:43)

I will soon be releasing the excellent "festival" text to speech program as a .dsl
It works well as a standalone speech , but it also can be integrated with quite a few programs,
many of which I have already made available in the repository.
I will also look into making the tkfestival gui for it as well, since there seems to be some interest...

Here are some links to give you more details ..

www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/download.html
festvox.org/festival/
linux-sound.org/speech.html

73
ke4nt

Thanks, ke4nt

Third parties had led me to believe that Festival was the best free public tool for TTS (text-to-speech) under Limux. Sadly, when I tried it, I was disappointed. While the rendering was decent, there was a totally unacceptable delay between when the engine was called and when it started to produce sound. That's why my previous remark used the qualifying phrase "low latency"! Festival is fine if you want to pre-generate speech for later playback (e.g. a talking book). But when I tried it, I couldn't accept the delay in *interactive* applications. (e.g. an incremental screen reader.)

I'd be pleased to hear if Festival (or some other free public engine running under Linux) can now do low-latency TTS. Is that the case?

Many thanks for your interest. I'm sure wrappering Festival for DSL is a welcome contribution all the same.

The festival.dsl is now available..

I wonder if the low-latency kernel patches you find in distros like the
AGNULA/DeMuDi project will help.. They had the same problems
with multitrack recording/sync-to-midi, and other challenges..

They have overcome them, and latencies are WAY down from a
normal kernel response.. Might be worth a look ..

73
ke4nt

People tell me the simple architecture of the CMOS memory in the BIOS is now passe, and things are very idiosyncratic these days. This suggests you are not likely to find (or write!) a single utility program to set and restore the CMOS for an arbitrary collection of PCs.

Chris, perhaps this means your best bet is just to look at all the BIOS configuration screens and snap digital photos of each. By archiving those, you'd be able to restore them in the event of the unwanted changes I had pointed out.

By the way, in trying to figure out what parts a PC has, you might find it useful to use the Aida tool bundled into the bootable SystemRescueCd ( http://www.sysresccd.org/ )

original here.