10 ms·

Gnuspeech

156 points by conductor 11y ago

steveklabnik 11y ago
The GNU project has _so much stuff_ in it. It seems like I'm always hearing about something I didn't know about before.
- tjr 11y ago
  Very true, though the first release of this package just came out a few days ago.
  - comex 11y ago
    Apparently it's been part of GNU for 13 years... but never had an official release? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnuspeech https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnuspeech
    - tjr 11y ago
      Interesting! Thanks! Also, I interpreted the statement about the v1.0 release as being the initial release; perhaps there was a v0.1 release before that...
donatj 11y ago
Requires GNUStep on Linux? This is very baked into the NeXT world it would appear.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- anthk 11y ago
  Unar uses GNUStep too, and it's not the same as a full GNUStep desktop setup. It uses far less dependencies.
thangalin 11y ago
Audio samples: http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~hill/gnuspeech/gnuspeech-index.htm http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~hill/gnuspeech/gnuspeech-inde...
- theon144 11y ago
  Thanks, I was looking for some. Also, holy crap! http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~hill/extra-synthesis-examples/Pat-a-pan.wav http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~hill/extra-synthesis-examples...
  - ilovecomputers 11y ago
    GNU vocaloids?
harperlee 11y ago
This seems super interesting! They say that they are using a novel approach that models the actual way humans create sounds. Is this completely new? I would assume this implies that you can reuse so much more among languages, and have a more flexible system - like getting it to shout or sing, making strange noises, whistling, etc. But I don't know a lot about it. Is what I'm saying Science Fiction? This is the kind of article in which i'd love (and I have almost come to expect!) to find comments that provide so much more breadth and depth of information that the actual link, here on HN; this is one of the things that make this community so great.
- ssalazar 11y ago
  The idea is actually quite old (as they half-way admit, this is based on a program that was developed on NeXT machines when those were current; the research goes back to the late 60s and 70s). Wikipedia has some background naturally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_synthesis#Articulatory_synthesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_synthesis#Articulatory_... There is also research into using this type of physical modeling for singing[1] and laughing[2], so its not far-fetched to imagine a model that can speak, sing, laugh, shout, and perform any of the various vocal articulations humans can make. The main obstacles seem to be figuring out how to control the model over time, how to smoothly transition between control states, and how to capture enough fine details to cross the uncanny valley. [1] http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~prc/SingingSynth.html http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~prc/SingingSynth.html [2] https://ccrma.stanford.edu/groups/mcd/publish/files/2013-nime-lolol.pdf https://ccrma.stanford.edu/groups/mcd/publish/files/2013-nim...
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    > The idea is actually quite old (as they half-way admit, this is based on a program that was developed on NeXT machines when those were current; the research goes back to the late 60s and 70s). I don't think linking the papers that form the basis of the work, and describing the history in fair detail (including the original development for the NeXT, and the technical change from real-time DSP-based synthesis to realtime CPU based synthesis enabled by CPU speed improvements since the NeXT was current) constitutes "half-way admitting" that the idea has been around for a while. Its pretty outright explicit.
superkuh 11y ago
It might be just me but I can't figure out how to even start compiling this to test it out on linux. That said, I'm always happy to see alternatives to Festival TTS. Hopefully it'll become a bit more user friendly in time.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
mintplant 11y ago
Steps to get this running on Linux, without messing with GNUstep: wget https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnuspeech/gnuspeechsa-0.1.5.tar.gz tar -zxvf gnuspeechsa-0.1.5.tar.gz cd gnuspeechsa-0.1.5/ mkdir build cmake -D CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release .. make ./gnuspeech_sa -c ../data/en -p /tmp/test_param.txt -o /tmp/test.wav "Hello world." && aplay -q /tmp/test.wav This uses Gnuspeech_SA, the cross-platform version. No idea how to get it to use a voice other than the default male one.
- conductor 11y ago
  Shouldn't there be a "cd build" command just after "mkdir build"?
  - mintplant 11y ago
    Yes, thanks. Unfortunately I can't edit my comment anymore.
- Hello71 11y ago
  wget -O- https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnuspeech/gnuspeechsa-0.1.5.tar.gz | tar -xz cd gnuspeechsa-0.1.5 cmake . cmake --build . ./gnuspeech_sa -c data/en -p /tmp/test_param.txt -o /dev/stdout "Hello world." | aplay $VISUAL data/en/ttm_control_model.config
  - ausjke 11y ago
    cc1plus: error: unrecognized command line option ‘-std=c++11’ apparently I need a newer gcc
    - _delirium 11y ago
      In case it helps in finding the right version: that flag was added in gcc 4.7.
danellis 11y ago
Honestly, this sounds absolutely terrible. Why is the quality so much worse than, say, Google's TTS running on my phone?
- aaronbrethorst 11y ago
  It's probably the best technology that the early 90s had to offer. FTA: gnuspeech is currently fully available as a NextSTEP 3.x version in the SVN repository along with the Gnu/Linux/GNUStep version, which is incomplete though functional Wikipedia[1]: 3.0 September 8, 1992 3.1 May 25, 1993 3.2 October 1993 3.3 February 1995 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP#Release_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP#Release_history
- GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
  That's the price you pay for ideological freedom.
- mediocrejoker 11y ago
  I think maybe it sounds worse because it's based on a more accurate and complex modelling of the human voice, so while it sounds worse now, it has the potential to get better and perhaps surpass implementations using more widely used methods. Can the voice synthesis method used on Android sing, scream, or make other sounds that are not speech?
- exogen 11y ago
  It does sound...vintage. The male voice (especially in The Chaos example) sounds exactly like the computer's voice in WarGames.
- gugagore 11y ago
  from what I can tell, gnuspeech is fully synthesized speech. Siri, for example, uses a voice actor to say tens of thousands of utterances, and in order to generate words/phrases that don't exist, they concatenates (more or less) segments from recorded phrases.
andrewray 11y ago
If you're on a Mac, you can have some fun with voices (plenty designed for multiple languages): say -v ? Or just run this script to pass hours of time in joy and terror: https://gist.github.com/DelvarWorld/3f700aac8d7972b053f0 https://gist.github.com/DelvarWorld/3f700aac8d7972b053f0
tomphoolery 11y ago
And GNU drops the ball again...missing a perfect opportunity to call one of their projects "GNUSpeak". ;-)
- qwertyboy 11y ago
  Egads! It was so obvious that I kept calling it GNUSpeak in my head, enjoying the cleverness of it all, and only now, following your comment, noticed it's actually GNUSpeech...
jkldotio 11y ago
I was recently looking at voice generation. The newer Festival is better than the one that's probably in your package manager. http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/morevoices.html http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/morevoices.html I wonder if we will see any of the deep learning libraries try to do voice recognition, a good open source implementation is lacking, or voice generation.
- hiddencost 11y ago
  Do you mean: Speech to text (called "automatic speech recognition") Speech to identity of the speaker (called "speaker id") ? (Also, "voice generation" is called "TTS" or "text to speech") There are multiple world class open ASR systems using DNNs. Check out Kaldi.
  - jkldotio 11y ago
    I am not sure of the source of the confusion. I meant TTS in the first part of my comment ("voice generation" isn't far from "speech synthesis", which is the title of the Wikipedia article for it in English) and both ASR and TTS in the second. Regarding ASR I'd not heard of Kaldi, thanks for the tip.
- makomk 11y ago
  According to the FAQ, the voices used on that demo page aren't currently publicly available: http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/demofaq.html#voices http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/demofaq.html#voic... (Also, the FAQ seems to imply that you'll have to pay to use them commercially when they are.)
roel_v 11y ago
Can anyone in the field comment on what is the best offline TTS available today? This project is old, hardly maintained and the samples sound horrible. Festival is... not very good, but 'acceptable'. The MS build-in TTS engines are OK-ish. Dragon has some TTS but hard to use outside the use cases they designed it for it seems, and I'm not sure if they're even using their own TTS engine? Haven't had a chance to try it out myself. Any major ones I'm missing? And just how much better are the online ones, like Google's? Anyone have any quantitative data on that?
- michael_h 11y ago
  For English (and I think Japanese), HTS with the STRAIGHT vocoder can be pretty amazing. Very amazing. Licensing on both of those pieces is problematic. (Edit: I should probably mention that HTS is not easy to use. It will require some mental fortitude.) Festival can produce very good results, but you have to get into the weeds with it and do a lot of planning. If you don't like Scheme, you're not going to like dealing with festival, and if you do like scheme, you're going to be frustrated by their particular scheme. I've also noticed a lot of folks looking at post filtering, but that is a sea of dragons at the moment.
  - roel_v 11y ago
    Assuming that for their demo at http://flite-hts-engine.sp.nitech.ac.jp/ http://flite-hts-engine.sp.nitech.ac.jp/ they would select a good data set and parameters, I have to say that I'm not particularly impressed. Do you know of any online examples of a well-tuned Festival set up? I didn't find the 'official' Festival or Festvox examples especially great, certainly worse than online available TTS services, and I have never been able to find an example of a well-tuned result of Festival.
    - superkuh 11y ago
      Flite is not Festival. It is a very cut down version for embedded machines.
      - 11y ago

Gnuspeech

156 points by conductor 11y ago

steveklabnik 11y ago

The GNU project has _so much stuff_ in it. It seems like I'm always hearing about something I didn't know about before.

tjr 11y ago
Very true, though the first release of this package just came out a few days ago.
- comex 11y ago
  Apparently it's been part of GNU for 13 years... but never had an official release? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnuspeech https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnuspeech
  - tjr 11y ago
    Interesting! Thanks! Also, I interpreted the statement about the v1.0 release as being the initial release; perhaps there was a v0.1 release before that...

donatj 11y ago

Requires GNUStep on Linux? This is very baked into the NeXT world it would appear.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
anthk 11y ago
Unar uses GNUStep too, and it's not the same as a full GNUStep desktop setup. It uses far less dependencies.

thangalin 11y ago

Audio samples: http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~hill/gnuspeech/gnuspeech-index.htm http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~hill/gnuspeech/gnuspeech-inde...

theon144 11y ago
Thanks, I was looking for some. Also, holy crap! http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~hill/extra-synthesis-examples/Pat-a-pan.wav http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~hill/extra-synthesis-examples...
- ilovecomputers 11y ago
  GNU vocaloids?

harperlee 11y ago

This seems super interesting! They say that they are using a novel approach that models the actual way humans create sounds. Is this completely new? I would assume this implies that you can reuse so much more among languages, and have a more flexible system - like getting it to shout or sing, making strange noises, whistling, etc. But I don't know a lot about it. Is what I'm saying Science Fiction? This is the kind of article in which i'd love (and I have almost come to expect!) to find comments that provide so much more breadth and depth of information that the actual link, here on HN; this is one of the things that make this community so great.

ssalazar 11y ago
The idea is actually quite old (as they half-way admit, this is based on a program that was developed on NeXT machines when those were current; the research goes back to the late 60s and 70s). Wikipedia has some background naturally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_synthesis#Articulatory_synthesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_synthesis#Articulatory_... There is also research into using this type of physical modeling for singing[1] and laughing[2], so its not far-fetched to imagine a model that can speak, sing, laugh, shout, and perform any of the various vocal articulations humans can make. The main obstacles seem to be figuring out how to control the model over time, how to smoothly transition between control states, and how to capture enough fine details to cross the uncanny valley. [1] http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~prc/SingingSynth.html http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~prc/SingingSynth.html [2] https://ccrma.stanford.edu/groups/mcd/publish/files/2013-nime-lolol.pdf https://ccrma.stanford.edu/groups/mcd/publish/files/2013-nim...
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > The idea is actually quite old (as they half-way admit, this is based on a program that was developed on NeXT machines when those were current; the research goes back to the late 60s and 70s). I don't think linking the papers that form the basis of the work, and describing the history in fair detail (including the original development for the NeXT, and the technical change from real-time DSP-based synthesis to realtime CPU based synthesis enabled by CPU speed improvements since the NeXT was current) constitutes "half-way admitting" that the idea has been around for a while. Its pretty outright explicit.

superkuh 11y ago

It might be just me but I can't figure out how to even start compiling this to test it out on linux. That said, I'm always happy to see alternatives to Festival TTS. Hopefully it'll become a bit more user friendly in time.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

mintplant 11y ago

Steps to get this running on Linux, without messing with GNUstep: wget https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnuspeech/gnuspeechsa-0.1.5.tar.gz tar -zxvf gnuspeechsa-0.1.5.tar.gz cd gnuspeechsa-0.1.5/ mkdir build cmake -D CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release .. make ./gnuspeech_sa -c ../data/en -p /tmp/test_param.txt -o /tmp/test.wav "Hello world." && aplay -q /tmp/test.wav This uses Gnuspeech_SA, the cross-platform version. No idea how to get it to use a voice other than the default male one.

conductor 11y ago
Shouldn't there be a "cd build" command just after "mkdir build"?
- mintplant 11y ago
  Yes, thanks. Unfortunately I can't edit my comment anymore.
Hello71 11y ago
wget -O- https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnuspeech/gnuspeechsa-0.1.5.tar.gz | tar -xz cd gnuspeechsa-0.1.5 cmake . cmake --build . ./gnuspeech_sa -c data/en -p /tmp/test_param.txt -o /dev/stdout "Hello world." | aplay $VISUAL data/en/ttm_control_model.config
- ausjke 11y ago
  cc1plus: error: unrecognized command line option ‘-std=c++11’ apparently I need a newer gcc
  - _delirium 11y ago
    In case it helps in finding the right version: that flag was added in gcc 4.7.

danellis 11y ago

Honestly, this sounds absolutely terrible. Why is the quality so much worse than, say, Google's TTS running on my phone?

aaronbrethorst 11y ago
It's probably the best technology that the early 90s had to offer. FTA: gnuspeech is currently fully available as a NextSTEP 3.x version in the SVN repository along with the Gnu/Linux/GNUStep version, which is incomplete though functional Wikipedia[1]: 3.0 September 8, 1992 3.1 May 25, 1993 3.2 October 1993 3.3 February 1995 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP#Release_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP#Release_history
GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
That's the price you pay for ideological freedom.
mediocrejoker 11y ago
I think maybe it sounds worse because it's based on a more accurate and complex modelling of the human voice, so while it sounds worse now, it has the potential to get better and perhaps surpass implementations using more widely used methods. Can the voice synthesis method used on Android sing, scream, or make other sounds that are not speech?
exogen 11y ago
It does sound...vintage. The male voice (especially in The Chaos example) sounds exactly like the computer's voice in WarGames.
gugagore 11y ago
from what I can tell, gnuspeech is fully synthesized speech. Siri, for example, uses a voice actor to say tens of thousands of utterances, and in order to generate words/phrases that don't exist, they concatenates (more or less) segments from recorded phrases.

andrewray 11y ago

If you're on a Mac, you can have some fun with voices (plenty designed for multiple languages): say -v ? Or just run this script to pass hours of time in joy and terror: https://gist.github.com/DelvarWorld/3f700aac8d7972b053f0 https://gist.github.com/DelvarWorld/3f700aac8d7972b053f0

tomphoolery 11y ago

And GNU drops the ball again...missing a perfect opportunity to call one of their projects "GNUSpeak". ;-)

qwertyboy 11y ago
Egads! It was so obvious that I kept calling it GNUSpeak in my head, enjoying the cleverness of it all, and only now, following your comment, noticed it's actually GNUSpeech...

jkldotio 11y ago

I was recently looking at voice generation. The newer Festival is better than the one that's probably in your package manager. http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/morevoices.html http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/morevoices.html I wonder if we will see any of the deep learning libraries try to do voice recognition, a good open source implementation is lacking, or voice generation.

hiddencost 11y ago
Do you mean: Speech to text (called "automatic speech recognition") Speech to identity of the speaker (called "speaker id") ? (Also, "voice generation" is called "TTS" or "text to speech") There are multiple world class open ASR systems using DNNs. Check out Kaldi.
- jkldotio 11y ago
  I am not sure of the source of the confusion. I meant TTS in the first part of my comment ("voice generation" isn't far from "speech synthesis", which is the title of the Wikipedia article for it in English) and both ASR and TTS in the second. Regarding ASR I'd not heard of Kaldi, thanks for the tip.
makomk 11y ago
According to the FAQ, the voices used on that demo page aren't currently publicly available: http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/demofaq.html#voices http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/demofaq.html#voic... (Also, the FAQ seems to imply that you'll have to pay to use them commercially when they are.)

roel_v 11y ago

Can anyone in the field comment on what is the best offline TTS available today? This project is old, hardly maintained and the samples sound horrible. Festival is... not very good, but 'acceptable'. The MS build-in TTS engines are OK-ish. Dragon has some TTS but hard to use outside the use cases they designed it for it seems, and I'm not sure if they're even using their own TTS engine? Haven't had a chance to try it out myself. Any major ones I'm missing? And just how much better are the online ones, like Google's? Anyone have any quantitative data on that?

michael_h 11y ago
For English (and I think Japanese), HTS with the STRAIGHT vocoder can be pretty amazing. Very amazing. Licensing on both of those pieces is problematic. (Edit: I should probably mention that HTS is not easy to use. It will require some mental fortitude.) Festival can produce very good results, but you have to get into the weeds with it and do a lot of planning. If you don't like Scheme, you're not going to like dealing with festival, and if you do like scheme, you're going to be frustrated by their particular scheme. I've also noticed a lot of folks looking at post filtering, but that is a sea of dragons at the moment.
- roel_v 11y ago
  Assuming that for their demo at http://flite-hts-engine.sp.nitech.ac.jp/ http://flite-hts-engine.sp.nitech.ac.jp/ they would select a good data set and parameters, I have to say that I'm not particularly impressed. Do you know of any online examples of a well-tuned Festival set up? I didn't find the 'official' Festival or Festvox examples especially great, certainly worse than online available TTS services, and I have never been able to find an example of a well-tuned result of Festival.
  - superkuh 11y ago
    Flite is not Festival. It is a very cut down version for embedded machines.
    - 11y ago