Festival, be the life of the Internet Cafe

The other day I was sitting in Matter of Taste, a cafe with Kitchener's best coffee and a wide open wireless connection, chatting in XChat when I came up with the notion that it would be great to be able to listen to the chat conversations going on in Internet Relay Chat instead of having to switch between my text editor (C code) and X-Chat.

I'd heard of Festival before, but it seemed more complicated than I really wanted to take the time to learn, and it didn't do X-Chat. A little more searching and I found Scott C. Kennedy's XChat Speak Perl script.

After untarring Scott's script in my ~/.xchat2 directory I noticed that the volume was extremely low and setting it higher in KDE wasn't helping enough. I found a temporary hack in the Festival FAQ, but the kal_diaphone.scm the FAQ talks about isn't in the path they talk about, at least not on my SuSE 9.3 system. In SuSE 9.3 the scm file is located in: /usr/share/festival/voices/english/kal_diphone/festvox.

The speech was also going a mile a minute, and while the FAQ had a solution, the solution didn't seem to work as well as editing the xchat_speak.pl perl script Scott hacked. The first thing I did was change the $VOICE variable to voice_kal_diphone and I increased the $SPEED variable from .75 to .90, the higher the number the more pause in the voice.

With the tweaks working well I decided to check out a few IRC channels. Just as my German Chocolate milk steamer was arriving so too was a frustrated software developer expressing his frustration for the whole cafe to hear - using a few choice words that Festival seems very good at pronouncing; which makes you wonder which words they trained Festival the longest on...