I'm trying to use text to voice on Slackware 12.
I'm using the handbook, but am unsure of what to do.
I tried adding a talker: chose Festival, English Canada; then tried English United States.

This is what is installed on my computer:
bash-3.1# find / -name *festival*
/usr/share/apps/kttsd/festivalint
/usr/share/apps/kttsd/stringreplacer/polish_festival_unspeakables.xml
/usr/share/apps/kttsd/stringreplacer/polish_festival_fixes.xml
/usr/share/apps/kttsd/stringreplacer/festival_unspeakable_chars.xml
/usr/share/apps/kttsd/sbd/polish_festival_sbdrc
/usr/share/services/kttsd_festivalintplugin.desktop
/usr/lib/kde3/libkttsd_festivalintplugin.la
/usr/lib/kde3/libkttsd_festivalintplugin.so
/usr/doc/HTML/en/kttsd/festivalintconf.png
/tmp/kde-joe/festivalintplugin-V0fHuc.wav
/tmp/kde-joe/festivalintplugin-TQg7ja.wav


In the Talker Configuration - Kttsmgr:
Festival executable: festival
Select voice: couldn't select; rescan didn't work
Character encoding: local (ISO 8859-1)

I tried a test, but didn't get a sound. These are the files that were produced:
/tmp/kde-joe/festivalintplugin-V0fHuc.wav
/tmp/kde-joe/festivalintplugin-TQg7ja.wav

Is there some more files I need to install?
I thought I did a complete install, maybe I missed something.

I tried searching on the Net, but not any help.

Thanks for any help in getting this setup.

You need additional components for this to work. There is a SlackBuild here
http://slackbuilds.org/repository/12...timedia/flite/
that will build festival lite. Install the package when built and tell KDE to use festival lite. All should be well.

Thanks.
I installed flite and text to voice works.

The sound, however, is not good (I don't see a way to adjust the sound quality). Is there another synthesizer that can be used; is it possible to install Festival on Slackware, or perhaps another program?

I don't know if it is possible to compile Festival, because of this info:
Festival 1.95 (The latest release) does not yet fully support gcc 3.4, suggest using an earlier version.
version on my computer:
gcc (GCC) 4.1.2

I would rather download an application (not much experience compiling, but would be willing to try if I knew what files I needed and options to configure with).

Appreciate any help

You can get festival packages and sources here:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/.../festival-2.0/

Unfortunately, there are no alternative voices available for flite. I've tried hard to find anyone who has created any or to find out how to convert exiting voices, but no luck so far.

You might investigate to see if any other speech synthesizers will work -some of the other projects are a little easiser to get working and not so large...

Thanks for the web site.

I've been looking at the site, but I need help in understanding this directory:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/.../festival-2.0/

The only site I know is Slackbuilds.org

I think the file festival-suite-2.0-i486-1.tgz is the package to install.
festival-suite.src2pkg is the shell script to build a package, but am
unsure of which files to use with it, or what the other directories and
files are for.

Appreciate help in understanding this.

festival-suite-2.0-i486-1.tgz is indeed the installable package. It was built under Slack-11.0, but the binaries should still work with later versions. If they don't, or you just want to build from the sources you can all you need there to compile it, with or without using src2pkg.

If you have src2pkg installed and want to compile it, you'll need the festival-suite-2.0.tar.bz2 tarball, the festival-suite.src2pkg script, the festival.wrapper and , optionally the slack.desc file. Just create a new directory somewhere you have write priviledges and download/copy the above 3-4 items in there, cd into the dir and run 'src2pkg -X'.

If you wanna build from source manually, you can just use the festival-suite-2.0.tar.bz2 tarball, or there are copies of the original sources in the 'original'. Building festival from scratch is no 'cup of tee'. I should place a note in that directory which explains about the festival-suite sources. What I have done there is to make single-tarball with the minimum needed sources to get festival working, because you need at least ~7 things to get it going, which come from several different places. The other directories there contain extras and copies of the docs, etc.

Usually, if you are using extras with festival, you need to have all the compiled sources on your system. My installable package contains enough of the development material to allow building some, but maybe not all, extras -like festival.

You might want to check out other TTS and voice-related program I have in directories above from where you linked to. There is flite, cvoicecontrol and espeak and maybe others.

JosephS

Thought I would give an update of my progress:

I moved the following packages into a directory:
/tmp/festival/
festival-suite-2.0.tar.bz2
festival-suite.src2pkg
festival.wrapper
slack-desc

I cd into /tmp/festival/ and built a package with the festival-suite.src2pkg script:
festival-suite-2.0-i486-1.tgz

I installed this package, but couldn't get it to work.
I tried to add a talker in Kttsmgr with the Festival Interactive synthesizer;
I couldn't get it to add any.
I removed the package and installed the binary package: festival-suite-2.0-i486-1.tgz, and that works ok.

I compared the package I built with the installable package and I found one difference:
In the package compiled with the src2pkg script in /usr/lib/festival-suite-2.0
the speech_tools and festival directory were missing a file: make.include
I don't know if there is any other difference.

Thanks.

Thanks, I'll look into that.