Hide Forgot
The 1.9.5 release of Festival offers significant improvements over the current 1.4.x package. Particularly, from an end-user perspective, the HTS (CMU "Arctic") voices sound much better than the previous ones, and there's even *gasp* a female voice. The release is backwards compatible with 1.4.3, so updating shouldn't be problem. And, this release is _basically_ what will be 2.0 -- they're only holding it up "until [they] can accommodate compatability with newer versions of compilers". Since the current festival 1.4.3 package has in its changelog a comment about making it work with gcc 3.4, I don't think we have to worry about that -- so, this is basically the same as what 2.0 will be. It'd be nice to get it in before the upcoming FC4 freeze, if at all possible. I have preliminary packages at <http://www.mattdm.org/misc/festival/>, which build and work on both FC2 and FC3. This should be a good starting place for an FC-devel/FC4 package.
Tomorrow, I'll work on integrating the suggestion from bug #75645 (don't put all that stuff in the bin directory). (Not really a blocker for this bug, though....)
Updated "0.mattdm8" release of this package moves utilities from speech-tools out of the way, hopefully addressing the bug #75645 issue. <http://www.mattdm.org/misc/festival/> Another approach would be to split speech-tools into its own package (it has its own source file, after all) and put all of these special-purpose utils in a subpackage of that. (Maybe still not installing into /usr/bin, to avoid conflicts with the various two- and three-letter programs.)
Any update on this?
Cool -- package is in rawhide now. Thanks!