[mh] Trouble getting flite tts to speak & flite vs. festival questions

[JimMH <jsk...@sb...>]

I set up festival and got it working.  But the delay to start speaking caused
me to look at flite.  From what I read it was faster.  This is on a Fedora
10 system.  So I did 'yum install flite' to make sure it was installed.  It
appeared to update an existing install.  Typing 
/usr/bin/flite filename 
got a reading of the file.  But mh is not speaking.
Here is the speech portion of the mh.private.ini file:

@ voice_text can be MS, MSV4, MSV5, festival, flite, theta or swift (for the 
Cepstral engine on Linux),
@ viavoice, vv_tts (for IBM's viavoice Outloud), NaturalVoice,
NaturalVoiceWine, or
@ program xyz (for a stand alone xyz program),
@ Set to blank to disable.
@ Use  voice_text = MS on windows for all Microsoft SAPI compatible TTS
engines, including AT&T NaturalVoice.
@ Other parms specify paths to various TTS engines on unix systems.

voice_names = male=>male1, mike=>male1,  sam=>male2, elder_male => male3,
mary=>  female

voice_text = flite        # Default Voice synthesis engine
# voice_text_festival     = /usr/bin/festival
voice_text_flite        = /usr/bin/flite
-----------------
There are some other items in mh.ini but they haven't changed since festival
was working.

I set debug = voice in mh.private.ini and got the following when I used the
web interface to speak the test "testing".  I got no output from the
speakers...

Speaking eliza data with voice=male, compression=
Voice_Text: speak app chatbot card  voice male compression  text testing
requestor 127.0.0.1
input  phrase is 'testing'
output phrase is 'testing'
speak_text: parms are 'app'='chatbot' 'card'='' 'compression'='' 'engine'=''
'length'='500' 'mode'='' 'raw_text'='testing' 'requestor'='127.0.0.1'
'text'='testing' 'to_file'='' 'voice'='male' 'volume'=''
Voice_Text volume=, mh_volume=26 vc=
Voice_Text new volume=26
Voice_text TTS: f=1 stdin=0 p=/usr/bin/flite a= -t "testing" ai=
-------------------------------
I'm not sure what all this means.  Can someone give me some help?

I am also wondering if flite is actually faster than festival.  And the
available voices for festival are reported to be better and  more choices. 
Maybe I should just go back to festival?  Interested in what others are
using.




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