[Menai-LUG] Re: Mandrake 9.2 installation problem (and meetings/UWB)

[Kevin Donnelly]

On Tuesday 15 Mar 2005 09:19, Rhys Jones wrote:
> On Wed, 9 Mar 2005 11:05:02 +0000, Kevin Donnelly <kevin at dotmon.com> wrote:
> > Good luck, and welcome!  KDE has just added a TTS app:
> > http://accessibility.kde.org/developer/kttsd/index.php
> > The main issue in developing that for Welsh would be setting up the
> > phoneme rules and recording the voices.
>
> Well, kttsd isn't a stand-alone TTS app as such - it's more a layer on
> top of the speech synthesis engine. 

That's right - it can use a variety of engines.  But the key point about it is 
that it is the first step in embedding this into the desktop at the user 
level, instead of them having to jump through various hoops to get it.

> The synthesis engine we use in CB 
> is Festival (http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/), for which
> one of our team developed Welsh letter-to-sound rules and a Welsh
> voice back in the mid-1990s.

Excellent.  It's quite interesting to read Welsh text with the English voice, 
as Thorben did for fun at the Urdd last year.  It actually comes out fairly 
understandably, although there are some problems with words like 
"cychwyn" (which comes out as "cutch-wine"!).  The range of sounds in Welsh 
(especially vowel sounds) is much less, and of course there's a closer 
correspondence between the orthographic and phonemic layers.

> Actually getting someone into a recording chamber and recording them
> is far less of an issue than subsequent segmentation into phones and
> diphones, but give us time :)

Fair enough, provided you promise not to take another 10 years :-)

By the way, are you around Bangor on any Saturdays when you're in the 
vicinity?  We were thinking of trying to set up a LUG meeting, and it may 
well be on a Saturday evening.

-- 

Pob hwyl / Best wishes

Kevin Donnelly

www.kyfieithu.co.uk - Meddalwedd Rhydd yn Gymraeg
www.cymrux.org.uk - Linux Cymraeg ar un CD!