GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 348210
Changing rate with Insert Left/Right is Backwards with Cepstral Voices
Last modified: 2006-09-15 20:04:29 UTC
Please describe the problem: I am using Cepstral David with Festival as my speech synthesizer. As best as I can tell from test-speech, the rate of this voice ranges from 1 to 400 with 1 being fastest. As a result, when using Insert Right Arrow in Orca to increase the rate, speech slows down. Similarly, when using Insert Left Arrow to decrease the rate, speech becomes faster. Steps to reproduce: 1. Install Cepstral David (http://www.cepstral.com/downloads/) 2. Run Cepstral's "Festivalify" script (http://www.cepstral.com/downloads/public/other/festivalify-cepstral-voice) 3. Configure Orca to use the Cepstral voice 4. Use Insert Left/Right to change the rate Actual results: Orca indicates that speech is getting slower when in reality it's getting faster, and vice versa. Expected results: Ideally, what Orca indicates and what the Cepstral voice was doing would match. Does this happen every time? Yes. Other information: I realize (assume) that this is a quirk in Cepstral and not Orca. But it *seems* like a bug from the end-user perspective. So.... Unless there is some easy magic that you can pull off to address this within Orca, I'm submitting this as a heads-up. Perhaps it is something that should be included in a FAQ and/or the docs upon release of 1.0 to make it clear to the user what is going on?
Please try the following from the festival command line prompt, which you get by running the 'festival' command: (voice_cepstral_david) (Param.set "Duration_Stretch" 0.5) (SayText 'hello) (Param.set "Duration_Stretch" 2.0) (SayText 'hello) With the Duration_Stretch at 0.5, it should speak quickly. With the Duration_Stretch at 2.0, it shoudl speak slowly. You can compare and contrast this with the (voice_kal_diphone) voice. I'm curious if the behavior is different between the two.
Indeed it is different. David: Duration_Stretch at 0.5 - Slowly Duration_Stretch at 2.0 - Quickly Kal_Diphone: Duration_Stretch at 0.5 - Quickly Duration_Stretch at 2.0 - Slowly
Thanks! I think this might be a bug the "fesitvalization" process of the cepstral voices.
Thank YOU! Based on the above, I just emailed support at Cepstral to see if they have any ideas/suggestions. If they do, I'll document it here.
You know, they never got back to me on this, but based on some conversation on the Orca list I decided to look at the festivalization process. The following seems to fix it: In festivalify-cepstral-voice.pl, line 233, change this line: (set! wpm (* 170 (Param.get "Duration_Stretch"))) to this line: (set! wpm (/ 170 (Param.get "Duration_Stretch"))) Kill all festival processes for the changes to take place. Having made the above change, Orca works with the Cepstral voice as I would expect. Hope this helps!
Forgot to mention, you need to re-rerun festivalify-cepstral-voice in order for it to work. :-)