Has anyone had any experience with festival on Haiku? I had a program called talkbox running on a very early version, but I can’t get it to run anymore.
Thanks,
RLFrost
I know someone has built espeak, but I am not sure of what state the port is in.
Festival and Flite (Festival Lite) are both already ported and licence wise they are better fit for haiku, but we need still need someone to port festvox (http://festvox.org/).
Once this is finished, we can connect to them to TalkBox and SpeakIt.
Build recipes:
https://bitbucket.org/haikuports/haikuports/src/18188335c655/app-accessibility/flite/
https://bitbucket.org/haikuports/haikuports/src/40f1d04622d8/app-accessibility/festival/
The espeak port doesn’t have native sound output, so currently it can only generate wav files.
I had a look at TalkBox but IIRC the license of the old BeOS release did not allow me o make changes to it. With your agreement as the original author I can try to debug this further and help you in getting it to run again.
It would be great to have TalkBox going, as we have so many gaps in our application ecosystem and it would help to fill in some of those gaps.
Other operating systems have text to speech services that provide self-voicing for other apps (like what Google Text-to-Speech does on Andriod), but most other operating systems also have accessibility focused screen readers that connect to that service (think Apple VoiceOver or Google TalkBack).
During the last GCI Scottmc came up with the idea of creating a text to speech (data stream) translator that could -for example- convert a .txt file into a .wav file on the fly.
Has anyone tried to build flite_x86 under x86_gcc2?
I get an error: packaging policy violation(s) in strict mode.
I haven’t tried building festival, to answer the previous query; I’d try espeak instead – which I think works with Haiku. However, imho, I think festival and espeak have sonically ugly voices.
If text-to-speech support were to come to Haiku, I’d quietly suggest that instead of using espeak or festival to read text dynamically, Haiku could have a compressed set of pre-recorded strings (i.e. “Do you want to shut down the computer now?”), saved as Wave, Ogg Vorbis, etc. sound bytes. These could be from a better open computer-generated TTS engine (i.e. libttspico), or human voice recordings we could do or extract from Voxforge. From there, they could simply be applied to dialogs, etc. as sound events. It wouldn’t be as elegant, proper, or what not… but it would work. Plus, it would sound a lot better than Orca and Gespeaker and more like how macOS and Windows 10 presently sound with VoiceOver and Narrator, respectively. Of course, using sound bytes wouldn’t be speech synthesis like using espeak would… and it would obviously be very limited in scope. If nothing else, it’s just a suggestion to the team/community… but one I thought I’d add into the discussion anyway, for whatever little my opinion is worth. 
I need flite_x86 not only as a voice engine, but also as one of the components for building Qt5.8.0.