“Coming home after a hard day at work after staring at the monitor continuously for hours on end, the last thing I want to do many days is sit in front of the computer again. At times though, I have this urge to grab a book and do some light reading but often the strain on my eyes dissuades me in pursuing this thought any further. This is where this very nice utility called Festival comes into the picture. Festival is a text-to-speech synthesiser developed by the Centre for Speech Technology Research at the University of Edinburgh. It is shipped with most Linux distributions and has been released under an X11-type licence allowing unrestricted commercial and non-commercial use alike.”
Wow, so this is someting I have to test, sometinmes I feel like FRY from futurama
I have the same problem, I will read some news but my eyes are burn out…
The other light-weight version of Festival is called Flite, is sounds the same.
The biggest problem I had when I looked at this was loading other voice files.
On advice from a friend who works at Graham Technology making virtual personal assistants and secretaries, he said Festival was an excellent system and that the quality of voice really depended on the voice file used.
I find the default voice workable, but has a little ‘clunk’ in its monotone voice.
Still, really simple to use. I use it with my email notifier to tell me “You have mail” and various other projects like getting my Mindstorms to call my mobile and read my email to me. Its fun.
It sounds pretty good, and its fun to use with GAIM.. Hear your friends talk instead of reading their messages.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/festival-gaim
It sounds pretty good, and its fun to use with GAIM.. Hear your friends talk instead of reading their messages
I don’t think festival-gaim is a good thing (I do not say it is not good).
There are framework in both Gnome and KDE that supports several TTS packages, one of them is Festival, and Festival is what I use. The package is not very easy to configure, especially when you want to use voices other than english.
Anyway, gnome-speech support it, and I think a better thing would be for gaim to support (and help improve) gnome-speech rather than plugging directly into festival.
I did not try it in KDE 3.5 to see if the TTS framework had improved. It could not recognise voices installed in 3.4 for example.
While I understand what you are saying, I think they serve a different audience. gaim should support gnome-speech (I think it does, not sure though) and that goal should be worked torwards, but festival-gaim is targeting a different audience. gnome-speech needs to be entirely understandable and usable using the voice, while the entire point of gaim-festival is just to read the messages. gaim-festival just helps me know whats being said to me and if its important without opening the window back up… I don’t want it describing the UI to me so I can use the program without seeing it, which something like gnome-speech would need to do with a blind person.
IMHO the best voice for Festival is cmu_us_slt_arctic_hts which can be found here.( http://hts.ics.nitech.ac.jp/ ). More about this on http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-195579-highlight-festival.html .