Subject: Re: [lojban] Lojban Text to Speech

From: Rob Speer <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 4 Jan 2002 16:31:18 -0500

On Thu, Jan 03, 2002 at 09:03:22PM -0500, Invent Yourself wrote:
> On Thu, 3 Jan 2002 [email-masked] wrote:
> 
> > I believe the dialog8k.wav you've discovered is the file to which I'm
> > referring. Yes, I'll agree that it could stand some improvement, but I'm
> > impressed with its intelligibility at this early stage. Even with my
> > (extremely limited) lojban vocabulary, I was able to pick out parts of what
> > it was saying.
> 
> 
> I can pick out the occasional word but not enough to get any context.

Once I got used to the 'accent' (not the Southern accent, but the fact
that, for example, a "whirring" sound represented {x}) by reading along
with the voice, I could understand about half of the words without
reading along.

Then again, I had read the English version of this conversation before,
so that provided the context.

I tried not reading it at all at first, and didn't understand a bit. The
main problem was "le skami" and "le prenu"; not only were they not
grammatically attached, only set apart by pauses ({.le prenu.} signified
{.i sei le prenu cusku}), but the pronounciation of "prenu" was totally
unrecognizable.

Still, I was generally impressed with the Lojban speech because it's
quite an improvement over nothing, which is what we had before. (Yes,
there is the anthem, but that was made from piecing together sounds from
Spanish, Italian, and other languages' synthesizers.)

festvox is the basis for the 'Festival' synthesizer, right? It's great
to see that can be adapted for Lojban. If someone recorded diphones (not
a trivial task, I know), I think we could have some relatively clear
Lojban speech come out of it.

-- 
la rab.spir
noi tirna le voksa be lo skami