Re: [Espeak-general] Faster speaking

[Tyler S. <ts...@pc...>]

On 6/21/2010 3:13 AM, Jonathan Duddington wrote:
 > I have made some changes which I hope give a small improvement to
 > eSpeak at faster speeds.  Also I have increased the speed range to 80
 > to 450 words-per-minutes, with a default of 175 wpm.
 >
 > These changes are in eSpeak version 1.43.46 at:
 > http://espeak.sf.net/test/latest.html
 >
 > I think the speech is better at 390 wpm (which was the previous maximum
 > setting).  However, I can't understand the speech at 450 wpm, so I
 > don't know whether that's useful.
 >
450 is understandable. Using en+m7, I´ve done the following so far:
Commented out the fast_test parameters in m7.
Added replace 0 aa a to the end of the file. The aa phoneme seems to be 
a longer version of a, which sounded too slow at high speed.

Recompiled the phoneme files, removing long from the i: phoneme in 
ph_english.

Another problem I ran into was the z phoneme.
At high speed, it sounds rather long. My first attempt at fixing this is 
to modify this part of the phoneme in the phonemes file to be:

   IF nextPh(isPause2) THEN
     IF thisPh(isWordEnd) THEN
       length 35
     ENDIF
And this seems to be working so far, though I haven't read as much with 
this on as everything else. Is there a better way to do that? At low 
speeds, that will break.
Some examples with the normal settings: "restrictions whatsoever", "is 
south" and "arrives from"

 > Do the Klatt synthesizer voice variants sound better than the original
 > eSpeak synthesizer at high speeds?
 >
 > Speeds and intelligibility may vary for different language voices.