Having the computer speak is key to human-like communication. However, the set of voices available for text-to-speech system (TTS) is limited. In this workshop we will be building a voice for the open source FestVox/Festival TTS that you record. The computer talks like you! (Or whomever you convince to record the prompts for you – your dog?).
The workshop is also a hands-on introduction to the free book “Building Synthetic Voices” that comes with Festival TTS.
You don’t need programming knowledge but you need some Unix knowledge. If you want to extend the recipes we will see in the workshop you will need to learn Scheme which is the programming language for extending Festival.
The workshop presentations will be in English, but we are more than happy to provide support and answer questions in French. Moreover, we will only cover generating English voices, as we are following the default tooling provided by FestVox. We hope to cover French synthesis in a later workshop.
We will cover:
- How to install and set-up Festival/FestVox/Edinburgh Speech Tools
- Overview of the full Festival TTS stack
- How to design prompts for limited domain TTS (reduced vocabulary)
- A full example in the bicycle safety domain that you’ll record during the workshop. (Hear it synthesized with Pablo’s voice here.)
- Introduction to diphone (large vocabulary) recording and synthesis (no diphone recording will take place during the workshop, though)
This workshop is just the beginning, potential follow-ups include French synthesis, differentiated intonation recordings or any other topic that interests the group. If you have a project that uses speech synthesis (or might benefit from it) bring a demo and we can hear it at the end of the workshop.
Requirements:
- A computer with a unix-like environment (GNU/Linux, Mac OS X or cygwin) capable of doing sound recording.
- RSVP to pablo.duboue (at) gmail.com required. Space is limited.
- Cost: $10 (all proceedings from this workshop will be donated to Foulab)
When?
Saturday, January 24th at 15h (about 3 hours in length)
Where?
Foulab, of course!
First evening dedicated to design of a PWM (pulse wave modulation) power control module.
Every good hacker sooner or later will require a pulse wave modulated power source. To simplify the project, we will focus on the controller and modulator (MOSFET). The module can then be connected to a power supply of your choice. We are aiming to construct a controller that can handle from 3 to 80 V at frequencies from 10Hz to 50kHz and currents of 20A or more.
When: 12 jan 2015 19h-22h
Where: Foulab
Everyone who is interested by this project is welcome.
Software defined radio (SDR) has become easily accessible thanks to the availability of inexpensive “dongles” using the RTL2832U chip. However, after tuning in the local FM station, sometimes it is hard to go further. This meeting brings together people with an interest in SDR to share knowledge and collaborate on projects.If you have SDR equipment, please bring it for show and tell (hence the title). And of course, it doesn’t literally have to be an RTL dongle, other radio platforms such as FunCube, HackRF, SoftRock, etc would be great.
Anyone with an interest in software defined radio is welcome. No particular background is required.
Time: 13h-16h 29-Nov-2014 at Foulab
There will be a round table discussion (in French lang.) of the “Internet after Snowden” held at room Z-330 of Pavillon Claire-McNicoll at l’Université de Montréal on September 23, 2014 at 16:30. The session is free, but preregistration is required. Full information is here
The next meeting of Réseau Libre, “hackfest”, will be held at Foulab on Thursday, April 3 2014 from 7 to 9pm. On the agenda: a demo of the project Commotion-Babel by the Polytechnic students and other fun things. This meeting is open to everyone.
For more information: http://wiki.reseaulibre.ca/nouvelles/2014-04-03-hackfest/
