Text2Speech Voices
UpStage's speech is generated by the Festival Speech Synthesiser, developed at the Centre for Speech Technology Research at Edinburgh University (http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/).
An avatar's voice is selected from a dropdown menu when uploading or editing an avatar. There are currently about 100 voices on the Open UpStage server; if you are setting up your own UpStage server, please see the technical documentation regarding installing voices.
Note that at the moment, it is only possible to use characters from the Roman alphabet (including letters with accents such as é, ñ, ø, ü) in the text chat, but not other alphabets such as Cyrillic, Greek, etc.
Voices currently available on UpStage
The voices currently available with UpStage have a filenaming system that gives a clue as to what kind of voice each one is. Some of the voices speak English with a foreign accent, some speak English with different English accents, and some are designed to speak other languages more-or-less accurately. We have endeavoured to include a good variety of accents as well as male and female voices.
The format is: ["e" or "emb"] _ [native language] - [en] - [modifications]
For example:
e_de – speaks and reads German
e_en – speaks and reads English
e_en-fast-f1 – speaks English quickly, in a female voice
e_en-wm – speaks english in a west midland accent.
Other accents in the e_en series are "n" for north, "sc" for Scots, "rp" for RP, "r" for rhotic (which means it pronounces the r in words like church).
emb_af1 – speaks and reads Afrikaans
emb_af1-en – speaks English in an Afrikaans accent
emb_de4-en-low-slow – speaks english, lowly and slowly, in a german accent
You can test the voices on the avatar upload and edit screens, by selecting different voices from the drop down menu and entering the text you want to test.
We are in the process of compiling descriptions for all the voices; following is the information so far:
Voice
Male
Female
Accent
Non-Eng
Description
awb_cmu
X
Scottish
Soft, slightly muffled
awb_nitech
X
Scottish
Clear, not very deep
bdl_cmu
X
English?
A little bit quavery
bdl_nitech
X
English?
Firmer than bdl_cmu, a bit higher, but clearer
bud
X
NZ?
Deep, calm
clb_nitech
X
NZ?
Robotic, soft
crunchy
Crunchy - good for witches & effects
default
X
NZ?
Smooth, young
e_en-fast-f1
X
NZ?
fast, boyish
e_en-r-f3
X
NZ?
fast, boyish
e_en-wm-slow
X
Australian??
nasal drawl
e_en-wm-slow-f3
X
Australian??
boyish nasal drawl, computerish & like a learner-reader reading
e_eo
X
foreign
emb_de4
X
German
German
neutral German male
emb_de4-en
X
German
mid-range, clean, English w/German accent
emb_de4-en-low-slow
X
German
pimp's voice: low & lecherous (English w/German accent)
emb_de5
X
German
German
slow low somewhat distorted voice
emb_de5-en
X
German
slow high somewhat distorted voice, English w/German accent
emb_de5-en-high-slow
X
German
mid-high slightly strangulated male, English w/German accent
emb_de7
X
German
German
middle somewhat slow and drawn out male, German
emb_en1-high
X
English
soft mid-range male voice
emb_fr1-en-low
X
European
low & lecherous
emb_fr4-en-high-slow
X
European
mid-high male voice, sounds like he has trouble speaking
emb_hu1-en-slow
X
European?
low soft female voice with slight European accent
emb_nl2
X
Dutch
mid-low male
emb_nl2-en
X
European?
mid-low male voice with slight European accent
emb_pl1
X
Polish?
mid-low calm female
emb_pl1-en
X
Polish?
mid-low calm female with European accent
emb_ro1-en
X
emb_sw1-en-fast
X
Swedish?
mid-low male speaking quickly
emb_sw2-en-high-slow
X
Swedish?
mid-high female with European accent
high
X
X
Computer
boyish computer monotone
rms-faster
X
American
rms-nitech
X
American
Deeper than roger, clear, little bit emphatic
roger
X
English
Thin, proper-sounding, not deep
slow
X
computer
gets slower & lower, very good for effects
slt-cmu
X
American
Flat, slightly muffly
slt-nitech
X
American
Flat, a bit clearer & stronger than slt-cmu
Adding more voices
You can install additional speech plug-ins on your own server to extend the range of voices available to the avatars. As long as you don't mind messing around with the source code a little bit it's not difficult – Patricia Jung explains how she did it (for Linux, using UpStage V1 - note that this is now several years old):
Just add another entry in the VOICES section in Upstage/upstage/voices.py like:
#txt2pho/mbrola:
'de1': ("| /usr/local/mbrola/pipefilt | /usr/local/mbrola/preproc /usr/local/mbrola/Hadifix.abk /usr/local/mbrola/Rules.lst | /usr/local/mbrola/txt2pho -p /usr/local/mbrola/data/ |/usr/local/mbrola/mbrola /usr/local/mbrola/de1/de1 - -",
_fest),
I know, it looks awful but this is only because the command is an awful chain consisting of four commands with a couple of options each and the relevant path:
"| pipefilt ...| preproc ... | txt2pho ... | mbrola ..."
It does some preprocessing (like exchanging all appearances of "z.B." with "zum Beispiel"), then hands the resulting text over to txt2pho and to mbrola.
As long as your command or command chain takes text input from the standard input and outputs the result as sound in raw format on the standard output chain (Unix stuff, ask me if you haven't heard about it) you can put whatever you like in between the "| and the ".
The above mentioned awful command chain will work when one has installed the txt2pho frontend; it uses the de1 female mbrola voice, and you can choose it in the web interface using the name de1.
The only problem with this kind of reconfiguration is: as config.py isn't a nice configuration file but a python script one needs to know at least that python is very picky about vertical alignment: It's extremely important that your new voice entries have the same amount of whitespaces at the beginning of the line as the other voice entries.
The reason it took me so long was TTS: I failed completely and utterly in making the German festival extensions for use with mbrola voices:
http://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/phonetik/synthesis/festival_opensource.html
work. Then I tried txt2pho with mbrola:
http://www.ikp.uni-bonn.de/dt/forsch/phonetik/hadifix/HADIFIXforMBROLA.html
(http://bogmog.sourceforge.net/document_show.php3?doc_id=34 has a nice installation description), ignoring Festival, and this worked at once.
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