William slows down inappropriately

[LoisF]

I have a Visual Basic application using William (and Calllie). I set an initial rate of 1 and allow users to change the rate with hotkeys. In the case of William, when a hotkey increases the rate, William will briefly speed up, then slow back down. Debug statements on the [voice]_sentence event indicate that the rate is still at 2, 3, 4, or whatever, but William sounds like he's speaking at rate 1 after the brief speedup. It doesn't happen with Callie or Microsoft Mike/Mary, so it must be a William issue. Ideas?

[manojb]

One way to isolate if the problem is in your VB code or the cepstral TTS software would be to do the following:

swift -n William -p speech/rate=<your-rate> -f file -o file.wav

Here the rate is in words per minute(default is 170 wpm).

If the above reproduces the problem its definitely a bug in TTS software.

If you sell/build TTS software that solves the monotonocity/speed problems, please do let me know. I would like to try it out.

[LoisF]

Using that test, William holds his rate over several sentences. Yet in my code, he slows down after the first sentence or two after he's been sped up. I had Callie in the same application, and she did not have that problem. I've since tried another engine and that engine's voices also behave properly using the same code. Very odd.

The other problem I'm finding is that these voices need a "warmup" before which they sound very choppy - regardless of whether I run it on an old laptop with (not sure what processor) with 320MB ram @ 600mhz or a newer desktop with a P4 at 4ghz and 1GB ram. After William & Callie get warmed up, they're fine, but the first words they utter are a mess.