[Espeak-general] inconsistency in espeak's rate

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

hi all
The subject is a little vague, but I'm going to at least make a stab at
this. I've noticed that espeak is very understandable up to a point. I'm
not referring to espeak's rate making it impossible to understand, but
rather that the faster it speaks, the more and more cut off some of it's
sillables are. Not all, but some specific ones, like r's, ar, ir, ire,
er, or, etc. The r at the end isn't as obvious, so bar can sound like
bah, bore can sound like bore without the r, etc. I'm not sure if
there's anything that can be done, but I'm bringing this up mainly
because I've noticed that the slower espeak speaks, the slower the
system seems. God, that's not good either. I don't mean espeak is
causing system performance issues, but rather that the system "feels"
slower when espeak is set to a very slow speed. Mainly because as you
are arrowing around, espeak's speech can't keep up easily, so the system
feels sluggish. This seems to mainly affect gnu/linux, the few times
I've used windows over the past couple of years it doesn't seem to
happen as much there, but it does a little. I've been fielding a lot of
complaints from new sonar users complaining their system is slow, and
why can't I switch to eloquence, which is so much better and so on.
Would it be possible to fix or at least improve these two issues? I'd be
happy to send a recording of espeak played at various speeds to
demonstrate the sillable issue. It's going to be hard to demonstrate the
second one, that of espeak making the system feel sluggish when it
isn't, but the best I can come up with is  that if you use linux, set
orca's speech rate to something very slow, 20 or 10 should do the trick,
and then navigate your system like you normally would. You'll notice it
immediately. The faster espeak is set to, the better the system "feels".
This happens in command line screen readers like speakup as well, though
it's not as noticeable. I hope I'm making some amount of sense, it's a
subtle issue that's hard to pin down exactly. I should add that this
happens in both espeak and espeak ng, though it's not as bad in espeak
ng, though it does still happen, both issues.

Thanks
Kendell Clark