[DECtalk] New synthesizer Gnuspeech

[Piotr Machacz]

If I remember correctly, Next and OS X have a lot in common. After Steve Jobs was fired from Apple, he went to work for… Whoever made Next OS, and when he returned a lot of the code from that ended up in Mac OS (this is why most OS X and iOS frameworks start with NS, NSString, NSSpeechSynthesizer, NsAccessibility and so on).
So I compiled gnuSpeech on my Mac and have played with the Monet application. It’s fully accessible. And ridiculously customisable. It’s not really an app just for Text to speech, more a program that lets you edit just about everything about the synthesiser. You have at least 10 windows you can show and hide to edit things like the phonemes, synthesis rules, script the intonation, various parameters of the throat (including its temperature for some reason), and a window that lets you actually synthesise text and shows you the phoneme output and graphs on how the mouth position changes. There’s also a more general purpose app that talks to the gnu speech daemon to synthesise text, which I’ll try to install later. 
On 23 Oct 2015, at 11:56, Tony Baechler via Dectalk <dectalk at bluegrasspals.com> wrote:
> 
> Yes, it was based off old code, but it most definitely runs on a Mac (at least based on looking at the source) and most definitely compiles and runs on Linux, so I think your fears and comments about buying a machine to run an ancient OS are unfounded.  OS X is most definitely still under active development.  I suspect speech quality on the Mac might be better with some tinkering, but I have no idea.
> 
> On 10/22/2015 5:27 PM, Carlos Fernandez via Dectalk wrote:
>> I am also worried about the constant mentioning of NeXT in the articles home
>> page. I don't yet know if this is based off some code from NeXT, but the
>> fact that they recommend actually buying a computer to run an operating
>> system that still undergoes Y2K bugs and is closed-source, to boot, makes me
>> wonder who is doing the work on this anyway. I would instead throw my
>> support behind another sample-less speech engine with which we are all
>> familiar, NVSpeechPlayer. I have been working (very minimally, though I
>> intend to increase my efforts) on porting this to GNU/Linux and other
>> platforms. I also want to add multilingual support to the engine, as it can
>> already generate a pretty good English sound.
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