November 2005
Beginner
330 pages
9h 44m
English
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Make Your Computer Talk to You
Install Festival on a computer to convert text to speech.
Whenever I see a science fiction movie set in the future, computers almost always fit a certain profile. They are either a form of artificial intelligence (AI) that can talk to people, or they are bent on world domination (or sometimes both). While the AI part isn’t exactly there yet, and hopefully the world domination bit is a ways off, computers talking to us is something we can have today. This hack shows you how to use Festival to convert text into speech.
Festival is a speech synthesis system hosted by the Center for Speech Technology Research at the University of Edinburgh (http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival). Actually, using Festival for basic text-to-speech is an underuse of the technology, because the system provides for all sorts of advanced speech synthesis in any number of languages.
To make Festival convert text to speech, you will need a few different components. First you need the core Festival program itself; next you need the Edinburgh Speech Tools library; after that you need some sort of lexicon database Festival can use (popular ones are the festlex OALD (Oxford Advanced Learners’ Dictionary) and festlex POSLEX (Parts of Speech Lexicons); and finally you need a speech database. Which speech database you choose basically depends on what sort of voices you want to hear. These festvox packages provide voices for American English males and females, British English voices, ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.