espeak + mbrola

[Hynek Hanke]

Hello Jonathan,

first of all, thanks for your contribution to the discussion
on the Speakup mailing list. I'll reply to that later.

I'd like to ask about the options of integrating espeak
with mbrola. Just for testing, I've created a simple
generic output module for Speech Dispatcher that uses
the approach where espeak phonemes are piped into mbrola
for synthesis and for basic things, it works pretty well.

But what about the cool advanced functionality of eSpeak
like SSML support, index marking and text events
(sentence/word begin). I fear that would be
difficult/impossible to achieve if simply executing
mbrola as a binary? eSpeak's pitch settings
doesn't seem to work although rate works well.
Also punctuation etc. works good. This is all quite
understandable.

There doesn't seem to be a library API to mbrola,
is there? Nor a 64-bit version of mbrola, although
using the current interface, the 32-bit binary can
be used in a 64-bit environment without problems.

I'd really like to learn more about the options.
What are the main problems and what would be
necessary to solve them.

Thank you,
Hynek Hanke