Master Troll speaks on Software Synth.

[Ken Perry]

Well I am what I consider to be a master troll.  A troll is a person who
watches a email group or news group but never really posts unless goated
into it.

Well my time has come once again to speak up.  No pun intended.  I am
recieving my BS in Computer Software Engineering and I far surpass my
sighted class mates in ability so hopefully once August 3 comes and goes I
will be able to contribute more to this project.  Right now I am fully in
Gear to finish school however so I am not able to help like I would like.

My idea on software speech is to do exactly what one has already hinted
wowards and that is well create a software synth  that is free currently
the easy and compact ones to use are VIA voice and even Dec talk software
speech for Windows.  There is also festival but it is a big pig and is not
pretty to use.  What I would like to do  is make a morecompact via voice
or dectalk style speech that only has one voice like double talk.
something like the old SAM for C-64 but that will start working as soon as
all initialazation is completed true we will miss boot up messages but in
Linux that is not a crime in fact most of the sighted people I know don't
sit there and stair at them because you can usually get into linux and
check the messages from previous boots unlike windows 98.  As long as the
speech came up when the user prompt came up that would be perfect.

I have not really been able to dive into Speakup code and really get my
feet wet but I think that What has been begun can be well um worked to
make this possible.  I want to say though what has been done so far is
very impressive and  I don't think any one should expect Kurt to  recode
his whole system in fact I think I would rather a system that finally
works for lets just say double talk pc than a system that never gets to
the point where we can use it.  Its not that hard to rus  out and buy a
double talk pc and that would finally be a perfect solution to get us all
out of windows and into an operating system we can all well re-engineer
the way we want.

So stop begging for Software synth and work on getting the system to work
as is first.  ASAP and WINDOW-eyes and JFW didn't just come up working
supporting every means of software and hardware synth.  I used a computer
for 8 years before that was even possible.  I am sure we can live with a
couple more years of needing hardware to support our system.


Ken Perry /System Admin www.valhalla.com