Festival Speech Synthesis System: - Speech Resource Pages

We save the above definitions in a file `spanish_el.scm'. Now we can declare the new voice to Festival. See
section 24.3 Defining a new voice, for a description of methods for adding new voices. For testing purposes we can
explciitly load the file `spanish_el.scm'
The voice is now available for use in festival.
festival> (voice_spanish_el)
spanish_el
festival> (SayText "hola amigos")
As you can see adding a new voice is not very difficult. Of course there is quite a lot more than the above to add a
high quality robust voice to Festival. But as we can see many of the basic tools that we wish to use already exist. The
main difference between the above voice and the English voices already in Festival are that their models are better
trained from databases. This produces, in general, better results, but the concepts behind them are basically the same.
All of those trainable methods may be parameterized with data for new voices.
As Festival develops, more modules will be added with better support for training new voices so in the end we hope
that adding in high quality new voices is actually as simple as (or indeed simpler than) the above description.
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24.2.9 Resetting globals
Because the version of Scheme used in Festival only has a single flat name space it is unfortunately too easy for
voices to set some global which accidentally affects all other voices selected after it. Because of this problem we
have introduced a convention to try to minimise the possibility of this becoming a problem. Each voice function
defined should always call voice_reset at the start. This will reset any globals and also call a tidy up function
provided by the previous voice function.
Likewise in your new voice function you should provide a tidy up function to reset any non-standard global variables
you set. The function current_voice_reset will be called by voice_reset. If the value of
current_voice_reset is nil then it is not called. voice_reset sets current_voice_reset to nil,
after calling it.
For example suppose some new voice requires the audio device to be directed to a different machine. In this example
we make the giant's voice go through the netaudio machine big_speakers while the standard voice go through
small_speakers.
Although we can easily select the machine big_speakers as out when our voice_giant is called, we also
need to set it back when the next voice is selected, and don't want to have to modify every other voice defined in the
system. Let us first define two functions to selection the audio output.
(define (select_big)
(set! giant_previous_audio (getenv "AUDIOSERVER"))
(setenv "AUDIOSERVER" "big_speakers"))
(define (select_normal)
(setenv "AUDIOSERVER" giant_previous_audio))
Note we save the previous value of AUDIOSERVER rather than simply assuming it was small_speakers.
Our definition of voice_giant definition of voice_giant will look something like