Subject: Re: [lojban] Lojban Text to Speech

From: "randl. nortmn." <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 3 Jan 2002 20:58:52 -0500

On Thu, Jan 03, 2002 at 06:23:13PM -0000, buzzwyrd wrote:
[...]
> I have added a link to a wav file that I generated from the Lojban 
> text. It was made with CMU's Festvox TTS system. It's by no means 
> perfect, but it does seem to help me to hear spoken lojban, even if
> it is a little gravelly.
[...]

I'm interested in knowing how you got Festvox to speak Lojban. Did
you actually write the frontend that parses Lojban text into phonemes,
or did you first convert the Lojban to English text, and then send
that through the standard English frontend? If the former, then all
that remains is to record a set of high-quality diphones for Lojban.
(Also, where did you get the fricative 'k' ('x' in Lojban) sound?)

By the way, for those that have commented on the poor quality and
apparent Southern twang in the sound file, both are due to the fact
that very old, poor quality 8kHz diphone samples are being used, and
probably the English ones. With those samples, even English sounds
terrible. I think the Southern twang is just an accident, largely due
to the fact that the samples are not of the pure Lojban vowels, but
the American sliding dipthongy vowels.

> Oh, and believe me, if you want to record all the diphones, I hope 
> you've got a leather larynx.

Agreed! This is why I pawned that off on others to do. And since you
seem to have done my part of the job already, I get to sit back and
enjoy the fruits of others' labor! ;-)

Seriously, good job on both the SHRDLU dialog translation and the
TTS. That translation is much more ambitious than anything I've
undertaken so far.

mu'omi'e randl.