The upstream of asterisk-prompt-de
(http://www.stadt-pforzheim.de/asterisk/) is gone.

We have a complete collection of studio-recorded voice prompts
in German for Asterisk 1.4 at
https://svn.amooma.com/asterisk-sounds-de/trunk/
which are still actively used.
(The SSL certificate is broken, don't worry.)
GNU GPL.


   Philipp Kempgen

First, sorry it took us that long to get back to you. The URL you give
asks for a login / password. Are the voice prompts you offered still
available? I'd like to upload them to Debian.

Lionel Elie Mamane schrieb:

No problem.
Even the project that the "Gabi" prompts were created for (the
Gemeinschaft PBX) [1] doesn't use them any more. The reason is that
we needed a couple of additional prompts. Having a professional
speaker record some 5 prompts means a lot of overhead.

Gemeinschaft is now using voiceprompts that can automatically be
generated by a TTS engine (SVox to my knowledge). They sound quite
good, though some of them could still be improved by using special
phonetic markup in the input text strings (SAMPA [2]).

Obviously they don't sound as perfect as a human speaker but in
comparison it's easier to add new prompts using the same voice,
or to produce audio prompts at higher sampling rates, and I didn't
see any complaints so far. :-)

Amooma used to have a web interface for the TTS engine at
http://www.amooma.de/voiceprompts
but it needs an overhaul and thus it's not possible for visitors
to generate new voice prompts. I don't want to make any promises on
when web-access will be re-enabled. The engine itself is commercial
software.

A tarball containing the voice prompts for Asterisk can be found at
https://github.com/amooma/GemeinschaftPBX/raw/master/misc/voiceprompts/asterisk-core-sounds-de-alaw.tar.gz
in alaw format.

Note that it's necessary to find a license for these voiceprompts
that is suitable for the inclusion in Debian. (CC'ed Stefan
Wintermeyer.) Do you have any suggestions for a license?
CC-BY-SA v3.0 maybe? [3]

The other alternative that I see is to generate prompts with an
open TTS engine such as eSpeak. I don't know if any good/open/free
german voices are available though. In my experience eSpeak was
not quite on par with SVox.


  Philipp


[1] http://www.amooma.de/gemeinschaft
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_Assessment_Methods_Phonetic_Alphabet
[3] http://wiki.debian.org/DFSGLicenses#Creative_Commons_Attribution_Share-Alike_.28CC-BY-SA.29_v3.0

I listened to a few random ones; IMHO one recognises they are
generated, they sometimes have an "airport / train station" feeling to
them, but they are certainly acceptable.

CC-BY-SA v3 is fine with us. Thanks in advance.

Hi,

I just NMUed asterisk-prompt-de and injected the package into Debian
team on Salsa.  I also added some debian/README.source file with
updated information about the new upstream version.  You can find it
here:

https://salsa.debian.org/debian/asterisk-prompt-de/-/blob/master/debian/README.source?ref_type=heads

Hope this helps
   Andreas.