adding french to the Speaker.

stéphane ducasse ducasse at iam.unibe.ch
Fri Nov 4 10:37:28 UTC 2005


Hi samir


> Hello Stef,
>
> According to Michel Morel who wrote Kali, a speech synthesizer, it is
> rather difficult to add a french voice to Klatt. However he's thinking
> about releasing Kali into an opensource licence, and allows us to make
> some experiment with the kali library and squeak.

if he release it in open source why not else I do not see the point.
>

> If you are interested, I can get the kali library to see how to  
> interface squeak
> with Kali ?

Sure the experience is interesting. I have no experience in calling  
external lib.
But vincent should learn that too :)

>
> See a demo here http://elsap1.unicaen.fr/KaliDemo.html




Here is the answer of luciano.


Hi Vincent, Stephane,
I think using the Klatt formant synthesizer is not the best option  
for french, since you'd have to spend a lot of time experimenting  
with the parameters until you get reasonable sounds for french  
phonemes. I would use a concatenative synthesis method instead,  
probably a method based on diphone concatenation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text-to-speech#Diphone_synthesis

I would look for already existing diphones bases such as those  
included in the Festival speech synthesizer (I'm not sure there is a  
french base available, tho). I have implemented LPC and residual- 
excited LPC synthesis in Squeak some years ago, and back then I used  
english Festival diphones. It required more memory than the Klatt  
synthesizer, but the quality of the speech produced was much better.  
I'll see if I can find the code for you.

About residual-excited LPC synthesis I found this reference:
M. Hunt, Zwierynski D., and Carr R. Issues in high quality LPC  
analysis and synthesis. In Eurospeech89, volume 2, pages 348--351,  
Paris, France, 1989. But it's not hard to implement from the Festival  
source code, LPC is really simple and even worked on real-time in all- 
Squeak code (no need to use C, Slang or anything like that).

Another option is to use the MBROLA synthesizer (http:// 
mambo.ucsc.edu/psl/mbrola/), that includes a french voice. The voice  
quality is even better than that produced by residual-excited LPC.  
Perhaps you could call the MBROLA dynamic library (I think it is  
MbrPlay.dll in Windows) from Squeak through FFI.

Let me know if I can help with anything else.

Later,
Luciano


On 11/3/05, bouchet vincent <vbouchet at gmail.com> wrote:
Hello,

I'm a french Stephan Ducasse student.


For an academic project, I must design a sofware who uses voice  
synthesis with squeak.
So, I need a french mapping in squeak.

I see that you have realised one in english and I want to know if you  
have some ideas on how to do this.


I kindly thank you for your attention,


Regards,

Vincent Bouchet





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