On 16/03/2018 21:43, ray carter wrote:
>  Don't know about alexa, but docs for the google AIY kit indicates that
> the pi/hat generates text and receives text in return. When there are
> easily available text to speech apps available, it would seem very
> inefficient and bandwidth intensive to stream.

Speech synthesis, as opposed to speech recognition, is not very
processor intensive. The synthetic ones require the most computation,
and the natural voice ones are more dependent on memory bandwidth and
storage latency.

We were able to run many synths on 200MHz iPaq StrongARM PDAs and had
all the big name synthetic and natural voice synthesisers running on
easily on early 400MHz XScale Windows CE mobile phones. Even a Pi1
wouldn't have problems running those, and I suspect should also be able
to cope with the latest versions.

Although nowhere near in the same quality league, the 8 bit 2 MHz BBC
Micro was able to run the Superior Software synthetic speech
synthesiser, by modulating the 4bit volume of the sound chip at about 8KHz.

---druck

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05