Ticket #66 (closed enhancement: implemented)

Opened 4 years ago

Last modified 2 years ago

Improve speech synthesis (speed, fancyness, usability)

Reported by: stf Owned by: stf
Priority: minor Milestone: RC2009
Component: RCSoftX Version:
Keywords: speech synthesis, HRI, TTS, athome Cc:
Git Branch:

Description

Our current speech synthesis system uses the Festival TTS software with the kal-diphone voice. The system exhibits an almost unbearable latency, does NOT offer feedback on its status yet and the voice an synthesis itself are not very natural.

The goal is to achieve more natural speech synthesis with extended feedback (at least some status-info such as "busy/processing", "speaking", "idle/ready") and preferably also integrated sound-playback (wav/mp3). This incorporates:

  • evaluation of alternatives to Festival
  • evaluation of other voices that sound more natural
  • evaluate and employ ways to influence the synthesis (per word/sentence intonation, voice-mode [singing,bored,tense,...])
  • speedup festival-engine usage by instantiating a festival-server once and then control this with remote commands instead of spawning a new festival-instance for every utterance (STF: already implemented and working on some systems, but due to a bug in the current festival package in Fedora not committed yet)
  • set up a collection of parameterizable sentences that allow for automatic variability (e.g. I am (going|moving|on my way) to %s).

Change History

Changed 3 years ago by tim

  • milestone changed from GO2009 to RC2009

Changed 2 years ago by tim

  • status changed from new to closed
  • resolution set to implemented

Festival plugin has been implemented in Fawkes (src/plugins/festival). An arbitrary TCL script can be loaded to set voice and voice parameters. The plugin indiciates if the speech synthesis is final, thus status info is reported. Additionally a flite plugin (src/plugins/flite) has been written and on the Nao the provided speech synthesis can be used.

Note: See TracTickets for help on using tickets.

This list contains all users that will be notified about changes made to this ticket.

These roles will be notified: Reporter, Subscriber, Participant

  • Fawkes Trac List(Always)
  • Stefan Schiffer(Reporter, Owner)
  • Tim Niemueller(Participant)