Re: Festival Voices and Czech voices

[Peter Drysdale <drysdalepete@gmail.com>]

Dear Milan Zamazal,

I started looking at the voices to see what I would need to have for testing.
I struck a bit of a problem.

I apt-get  the festvox-czech-ph voice (this also brought in
festival-czech automatically).

I configured the default voice in my .festivalrc file to pick up the new
voice with:

(set! voice_default 'voice_czech_ph)

In the absence of any other czech text files I decided to use the shipped
/usr/share/doc/festvox-czech-ph/README.cs

I commanded festival to read this with
festival --tts README.cs

I do not speak Czech but from my partial understanding via another
eastern European language it was quite clear
that most of the time the voice was reading the README.cs file and
saying something
like the Czech equivalent for "don't know" or "don't understand". Some words
was being rendered in what appeared to be Czech but most were not. Mostly it was
saying something like "don't know" in Czech.

I hoped that I would be able to at least get it to read the readme file
which comes with the voice itself. Is this a dictionary or encoding problem?
Do you know where I got the configuration incorrect?

with very best regards,
Peter Drysdale