[gentoo-user] festival usage (possibly OT)

[gentoo-user] festival usage (possibly OT)

[William Hubbs]

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All,

we have several open bugs on app-accessibility/festival and
app-accessibility/speech-tools.  These packages have been around for a
long time, and upstream appears, at least so far, to be dead (my
maintainer says that he has been unable to contact them).  These
packages are very difficult to maintain, because of their highly custom
build system.

In accessibility, as far as I am aware, espeak has become the most used
software speech synthesizer.  So, if there are not any objections, I am
considering removing festival from the main gentoo portage tree.

So, what I'm trying to figure out is how popular festival is and what it
is being used for.  If you use festival, can you reply to this thread
and give me an idea of how important this package is to you and how
often you use it, etc?

- -- 
William Hubbs
gentoo accessibility team lead
williamh@gentoo.org
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Re: [gentoo-user] festival usage (possibly OT)

[Dale]

William Hubbs wrote:
> All,
>
> we have several open bugs on app-accessibility/festival and
> app-accessibility/speech-tools.  These packages have been around for a
> long time, and upstream appears, at least so far, to be dead (my
> maintainer says that he has been unable to contact them).  These
> packages are very difficult to maintain, because of their highly custom
> build system.
>
> In accessibility, as far as I am aware, espeak has become the most used
> software speech synthesizer.  So, if there are not any objections, I am
> considering removing festival from the main gentoo portage tree.
>
> So, what I'm trying to figure out is how popular festival is and what it
> is being used for.  If you use festival, can you reply to this thread
> and give me an idea of how important this package is to you and how
> often you use it, etc?
>

Wasn't they going to put speech software on the install CD?  I read they
was on -dev a while back.  If this is not stable and being maintained,
how they going to put it on the CD?

I tried it once, it was cool sounding.  Sounded like the voice on War
Games, the old movie.

Dale

:-)  :-) 

Re: [gentoo-user] festival usage (possibly OT)

[William Hubbs]

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On Tue, Jul 07, 2009 at 11:49:22AM -0500, Dale wrote:
> Wasn't they going to put speech software on the install CD?  I read they
> was on -dev a while back.  If this is not stable and being maintained,
> how they going to put it on the CD?
 
 Yes, that is being worked on, but we are using espeak, speakup and
 espeakup for the speech.

If you haven't played with espeak, it is a small, light weight, multi
lingual speech synthesizer that is much more responsive than festival.

- -- 
William Hubbs
gentoo accessibility team lead
williamh@gentoo.org
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Re: [gentoo-user] festival usage (possibly OT)

[Michael Higgins]

On Tue, 7 Jul 2009 11:23:55 -0500
William Hubbs <williamh@gentoo.org> wrote:


William -- 

Thanks VERY much for asking here. Seeing the post on -dev, I wanted (as is often the case) to reply, but... :(

This is much better: Here, "no replies" could be taken as a pretty good sign no one cares. ;-)

> we have several open bugs on app-accessibility/festival and
> So, if there are not any
> objections, I am considering removing festival from the main gentoo
> portage tree.

I was trying to use it with Asterisk until I hit a file collision error. So, maybe look for another bug report soon... I just started emerging the latest keyword-masked version, so maybe this is fixed already. Nope.

As for espeak...

http://asterisk-espeak.sourceforge.net/ ... not for 1.6.x (current) Asterisk.

So, I think Festival is still the only option for this. Perhaps it'd be good to know for sure before you decide to mothball, or give up maintenance of the ebuilds.

As for "upstream" development, it looks like they are busy. Is three years really so long not to do a release for something that (apparently) works?

Looking at the mailing list archives, I see developers posting this year. 

Short of an announcement that the project is abandoned, why are you eager to reap it? Developers are totally allowed to ignore distro packagers -- particularly academics in the summertime, no? 

Are other distros dropping it?

> 
> So, what I'm trying to figure out is how popular festival is and what
> it is being used for.  If you use festival, can you reply to this
> thread and give me an idea of how important this package is to you
> and how often you use it, etc?

Anyway, for my purposes and from what I can see, it is simply needed in the tree. And somehow I need to fix this file collision before I can even install it.

Thanks again for asking.

Cheers,

-- 
 |\  /|        |   |          ~ ~  
 | \/ |        |---|          `|` ?
 |    |ichael  |   |iggins    \^ /
 michael.higgins[at]evolone[dot]org

Re: [gentoo-user] festival usage (possibly OT)

[Willie Wong]

On Tue, Jul 07, 2009 at 11:23:55AM -0500, Penguin Lover William Hubbs squawked:
> In accessibility, as far as I am aware, espeak has become the most used
> software speech synthesizer.  So, if there are not any objections, I am
> considering removing festival from the main gentoo portage tree.
> 
> So, what I'm trying to figure out is how popular festival is and what it
> is being used for.  If you use festival, can you reply to this thread
> and give me an idea of how important this package is to you and how
> often you use it, etc?
> 

I use festival more from a hobbyist point of view rather than
accessibility necessity. I played around with voice interaction a
while back and back then festival was pretty much the only good
option. 

Considering that most of what I did was hacked-together perl and shell
scripts, looking at espeak.sf.net I see that using espeak as a drop-in
replacement won't be too difficult. 

Thanks for keeping us (the users) in touch. As to your question: as
long as festival is not the only software that supports the
text-to-speach function (and it is not, as you pointed out), I won't
complain if you see it as dead upstream and trim it from the tree. 

W
-- 
Physics: a liberal arts on steroids.
       ~Prof. Peter Meyers.
Sortir en Pantoufles: up 947 days, 22:06

Re: [gentoo-user] festival usage (possibly OT)

[bn]

William Hubbs ha scritto:
> All,
> 
> we have several open bugs on app-accessibility/festival and
> app-accessibility/speech-tools.  These packages have been around for a
> long time, and upstream appears, at least so far, to be dead (my
> maintainer says that he has been unable to contact them).  These
> packages are very difficult to maintain, because of their highly custom
> build system.
> 
> In accessibility, as far as I am aware, espeak has become the most used
> software speech synthesizer.  So, if there are not any objections, I am
> considering removing festival from the main gentoo portage tree.
> 
> So, what I'm trying to figure out is how popular festival is and what it
> is being used for.  If you use festival, can you reply to this thread
> and give me an idea of how important this package is to you and how
> often you use it, etc?

I don't know how essential it is, however LMMS (Linux Multimedia
Studio), one of the few usable sequencers for Linux, used Festival for
its "singerbot" plugin.

I just googled around and found that the plugin has now temporarily been
removed upstream, but maybe it's worth checking if some other audio
package is using Festival.

m.