French Language

[ryanleesipes]

Develop support for the French language.

[AxelVoitier]

Do you need help with french-speaker voice files? Or is there an algomagic that can adapt any voice to any language?

[forslund]

Any help is appreciated I'd say. @LongBoolean may correct me if I'm wrong but as far as I can tell voices and languages are somewhat separated in this kind of system. To add french a voice I think the quickest path would be using an existing voice and adding new language pronunciation rules.

If you'd like to work on this there are some documentation found on various places around the net:

http://www.festvox.org/flite/doc/flite_8.html
https://sourceforge.net/p/at-flite/wiki/AddingNewLanguage/

[zeehio]

A dataset of speech recordings in French aimed to build TTS systems.

http://datashare.is.ed.ac.uk/handle/10283/2353

[poupryc]

Nobody knows when will add the French ?

[zeehio]

Well, the Spanish support will hopefully land really soon (hopefully this week). And French would be next, but probably not that soon...

It seems we have found a high quality dataset of recordings for creating a speech model in French, but we are still lacking a good language model.

In particular we are looking for a free software tool (preferably MIT or BSD-like licensed) able to phonetically transcribe and syllabify French sentences. There are some GPL options we may end up using instead.

[poupryc]

I am pleased to read that the integration of French is still current
I would wait ! Hoping that the integration of French is fluid and clear, even with the management of accents and intonation.
Good luck

[zeehio]

The initial version still has a lot of room for improvement, but I got some sort of audio at least from Zoé, our first French voice:

test_zoe.wav.zip

There is a lot of work to do in many aspects. Currently the voice speaks too fast and pauses are not well inserted, but as something I've done on my free time is not that bad!

There is a lot of work in the word->phoneme dictionary in order to get good pronunciation. I created the entries with a quick and dirty script and I did not review it manually. I know there are duplicated entries, some entries with wrong transcriptions, extra or missing phonemes (especially at word boundaries), etc...

We are dividing mimic into several modules and repositories. Until some pull requests are reviewed and some packaging work is done it won't be straightforward to try the French voice.

Once we have an easy way to try the French voice, if someone with French skills and time wants to start adding and fixing entries, they will simply need to fork the https://github.com/MycroftAI/mimic-french repository, edit the file https://github.com/MycroftAI/mimic-french/blob/development/src/lex/fr/fr_dict.out and submit pull requests. Of course you can already do this, but you won't have an easy way to see the improvements of your contributions right now.

[poupryc]

Really impressive! Without disconcerting, everything begins somewhere not true?

For now the voice is not really human, the timbre is robotic, the connections ("liaisons" in french) are not respected, in short, there is still work to do ! I am super excited about what we could build with a French voice! So much opportunity !

If I have the time, I would like to build a NodeJS interface => Mimic (with the Matrix Voice project, it would be just incredible!) 👍

Thank you for your work and your project 😄

[Urakenn]

Bonjour, le projet d'une voix mimic Française de bonne qualité est toujours d'actualité ? Existe t-il déjà quelque chose d’intéressant ? Merci !

[Urakenn]

Hello, the project of a voice mimic French of good quality is still relevant? Is there anything interesting already? Thank you !