Dear Frank Leoffler (original bug opener), Javier Serrano Polo (contributor to bug discussion), Jean-Philippe (maintainer of festival package),
I am making another attempt to close this bug. For Frank and Javier's benefit - I am an uploader for the festival package. This bug has been open since November 2004 - an inordinately long period of time. First, I would like to draw your attention to the fact that for speech synthesis without voice tweaking in the English language it is preferable to use flite rather festival. Flite has a much smaller memory footprint and runs much faster (It is compiled C code rather than c++ with a scheme interpreter). Please note flite was written by the same authors as festival especially for those not modifying/experimenting with voices and requiring high performance. For a couple of years now flite in Debian has shipped a CLUSTERGEN voice of the well known "slt" female voice. It is both a free software voice and can be recreated using a purely free software toolchain. The voice is bundled with flite so is within the "main" archive of Debian. The voice is small - approximately a few megabytes. I make the following observations about this voice. It is a statistical parametric voice and thus has a fairly modern design. I would suggest that generally it would be preferred by users to diphone or MBROLA voices. In my experience, users also prefer it to the clunits slt voice (the one mentioned above as large 100MB+). As such it is a good quality voice. In my experience clustergen voices run approximately 5 times faster in flite than festival. Although I could backconvert this voice for festival, I would think it is better to use it from within flite. I suggest that in this sense the feature required to close this bug has thus been satisfied by Debian for more than one year. If you have an comments suggesting why CLUSTERGEN slt voice running within flite does not satisfy the requirements for closing this bug please reply so we can otherwise discuss this further. In the absence of any comments I shall close this bug in two weeks as having been satisfied by the packaging of version 1.4 of flite which includes CLUSTERGEN slt voice. with very best regards, Peter
