[Espeak-general] improving the english US voice

[kendell c. <cof...@gm...>]

hi all
i've recently begun testing out the english us voice because i'm  in the 
US and it made sense to listen to a voice that sounds like it's from the 
states. It sounds very good actually with a few quirks. I'm no expert in 
speech phonetics but i'll try to write down what I've noticed. This is 
not a complaint, I want to help the english us voice become as good as 
the UK one if i can. The t sound can sometimes sound like a d. In us 
english this is usually correct. better, for example has the t, I'm not 
sure what the correct word is for it but it's said as a d. but for stuff 
like  bottom  beta  and pocket, the t is said as a t. I've looked in the 
en_list and eng-us voice file itself and I can't seem to work out where 
to fix this. I want to make a general fix, and avoid making an en_extra 
or en_list entry for every  mispronounced t I'm not even sure how 
though. Sometimes the o is said sort of strangely or overstressed. 
configuration, complain, and confront  are overstressed a bit.  I've 
played around with the espeak command line tool and if you place an @ 
symbol in the place of the o they sound correct.  It's kind of hard to 
make a general fix as english seems so complicated, sometimes the stress 
can change depending on where it is in a sentence so I'm having trouble 
designing a fix that works. I have a rather large en_extra file, about 
fifty five entries. Should I send that as an attachment? Some of the 
stuff is lord of the rings and harry potter fixes so if you guys want I 
can cut that out but most of it is general word fixes. Naivete, and 
anesthetic are just a couple of examples. Sorry for the long email but I 
want to help espeak but I'm not an expert in speech
Thanks
Kendell clark