[Xastir] Festival & Speech

[Tom Russo]

On Tue, Nov 14, 2006 at 09:32:04PM -0500, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <duffy at wb8nut.com> flavor, containing:
> 
> From what I believe, Festival will read the call of a new station, 
> maybe the message text, etc.  Just a bit fancier than the vanilla audio 
> alerts.  I was just trying to figure out how to get Festival speech 
> working as more of a learning process.  Of all the times I have ventured 
> into Xastir over the past two years, this is the farthest I have ever 
> gotten towards getting everything working and understanding it. Festival 
> is my last hurdle.

Yes, festival is speech synthesis as opposed to playing canned sounds.  You 
can configure xastir to read out the call-signs of new stations (really 
annoying in busy areas), the fact that you have incoming messages and who 
they're from (sometimes useful), the contents of those messages (sometimes 
useful, especially while driving), and also read out proximity alerts, as in 
"Proximity Alert, KM5VY five miles from station KM5VY-9"

I have found that festival, while occasionally useful and initially
entertaining, is more often an annoyance that I turn off most of the time.  
Your mileage, of course, may vary dramatically.

-- 
Tom Russo    KM5VY   SAR502   DM64ux          http://www.swcp.com/~russo/
Tijeras, NM  QRPL#1592 K2#398  SOC#236 AHTB#1 http://kevan.org/brain.cgi?DDTNM
"And, isn't sanity really just a one-trick pony anyway? I mean all you get is
 one trick, rational thinking, but when you're good and crazy, oooh, oooh,
 oooh, the sky is the limit!"  --- The Tick