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Subject: RE: Tts in rockbox

RE: Tts in rockbox

From: Andrew Hart <ahart_at_dim.uchile.cl>
Date: Fri, 26 May 2006 16:29:21 -0400

This engine looks interesting. These comments are very
preliminary, as I've only spent five minutes looking at it.

Points in its favour:
Small; though I don't know what working space it needs to run.
It appears to be a phoneme-based tone-generated synthesizer which
doesn't require much memory or CPU grunt to run.

Points against it:
It currently dynamically links against the PortAudio library, which
is most probably unnecessary. It would be necessary to investigate
if PortAudio is really needed--my feeling is that it is not since
Rockbox already has it's own platform independent audio subsystem.
It's written in C++. It would have to be reworked in plain C so that
it could be compiled on all the different platforms independently and
without compatibility issues, as well as to conserve memory in the
generated binary.

I need to study it some more. I have been looking at whether Flite
would be a possibility. Flite, however, is a concatinative voice
synthesizer requiring a reasonable amount of grunt. From what I can
tell, Flite requires 2-3 megs of static RAM or ROM to hold the
software plus a meg of working memory. The software codec capable
players such as the Iriver H340 can probably handle Flite, but Flite
is out of the question for the Archos devices. Flite is also written in C.

Cheers,
Andrew.

At 15:36 26-05-2006, you wrote:
>It might take some work, but would this engine work?
>http://espeak.sourceforge.net
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: rockbox-bounces_at_cool.haxx.se [mailto:rockbox-bounces_at_cool.haxx.se] On
>Behalf Of Jens Arnold
>Sent: Friday, May 26, 2006 11:06 AM
>To: rockbox_at_cool.haxx.se
>Subject: Re: Tts in rockbox
>
>On 26.05.2006, Mark wrote:
>
> > None of the current targets are powerful enough to do understandable
> > TTS in realtime.
>
>This is imho not true. All our targets should have enough processing power
>to run realtime TTS. A plain Amiga 500 (7MHz MC68000, 512KB of RAM) was able
>to do it in the 80s, with a narrator.device of ~64KB and a
>translator.library of ~13KB.
>(Note: These are enhanced versions - the original AmigaOS 1.3 versions were
>probably still smaller)
>
>The biggest hurdle on archos was the inability to play PCM samples - but
>that's possible now thanks to the PCM codec.
>
>The real challenging task now would be to actually write a compact,
>efficient, opensource TTS engine, preferably supporting more than one
>language.
>
>
> > On Fri, 26 May 2006 13:39:15 +0100, Juan Hernandez <juanh_at_cox.net>
> > wrote:
>
> >> Hello, I am blind, and would like to contribute to the rockbox
> >> project.
>
> >> I am wanting to write code for tts (Text to Speech) support in RB,
> >> right now, the voices idea works really well, but what if a blind
> >> user gets into an area that doesn't speak? I'd like to work on this.
>
> >> If any one has ideas on this please let me know.
>
>
>
>Regards, Jens
Received on 2006-05-26

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