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The developers of the festival text-to-speech program do not seem to have been aware that DEC can stand for the Digital Equipment Corporation as easily as it can stand for December, and that SEP can stand for Somebody Else's Problem.

I, for one, have never used DEC and SEP to refer to month names. Never once. In fact, since I began using festival to read things out and generally give my eyes a break, I've discovered that I hate all abbreviations, precisely because they're ambiguously un-meaningful, conveying an air of military-style deliberate obfuscation.

But, annoyingly, any time festival encounters these or similar two-letter and three-letter collocations (like ST, which more often means Saint or Star Trek than Street), it reads them out.

If I am going to listen to a text, I actually look hard for these abbreviations by means of regular expressions, so that I can un-abbreviate them. I don't want festival to get involved in that process.

But configuring festival requires lisp, much like emacs. Which scheme statement will allow me to totally disable this feature in the .festivalrc?

Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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ixtmixilix
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1 Answers1

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Documentation about english_token_to_words says that :

Returns a list of words for NAME from TOKEN. This allows the user to customize various non-local, multi-word, context dependent translations of tokens into words. If this function is unset only the builtin translation rules are used, if this is set the builtin rules are not used unless explicitly called.

Maybe you can try to unset it. I am not familiar with this syntax, but it should look like :

(unset! english_token_to_words)

And if it's not enough, there's also a token_to_word wrapper :

(unset! token_to_words)
Coren
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  • i tried unsetting these via the command line but got errors: the command i used was 'text2wave -eval '(unset! english_token_to_words)' -o hello.wav'. the error was SIOD ERROR: unbound variable : unset! – ixtmixilix May 13 '12 at 11:45