Raspberry Pi Journal #43

Speech Synthesis Trouble

I'm having a hard time coming up with proper speech synthesis. I tried using espeak, and it seems to work, but the first few seconds was off as if having buffer underflow, and the last few seconds was slow, as if it's having buffer overflow. Tried festival, and that too, suffers from the same problem.

As a last resort, I installed Basic256, and use its "say" command. The speech was clear and concise. Unfortunately, the buffer overflow problem is still happening. So, in the end I gave up.

I think the problem does not lie in the speech program. After all, all the speech module does is chaining snippets of audio to make the speech. I don't see any problem in that regard. It's the audio driver that is a problem. Apparently, the buffer isn't set up properly and so the audio becomes scrambled.

It should be possible that the audio be working fine. After all, I don't see any trouble regarding audio in playing movies.