linux and accesibility apps

[Saqib Shaikh]

I paraphrased what I previously read on the web site.  I just visited the
site and find that the quote I used has been removed, but a whole section on
performance has been added.  In short, Flite is faster to start up and
FreeTTS is faster to process text and speak it.  Here is the section from
the site:

How does FreeTTS perform?

We compared the performance of FreeTTS with that of Flite (original C
version) on a machine with this configuration:

* single 296MHz CPU SPARC v9 processor
* SolarisTM 8 in 64-bit mode
* Java 2 SDK, Standard Edition, v 1.4

We rendered the first two chapters of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by
Lewis Carroll (about 20 minutes of text), and the entire text of Jules
Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth (about 8 hours of text) using
both Flite and FreeTTS. The results are summarized below:

Single CPU 296MHz SPARC v9 Flite FreeTTS Loading Time for 'Alice' text 0.0s
4.1s Processing Time for 'Alice' text 43.7s 24.1s Loading Time for 'Journey'
text 0.0s 7.0s Processing Time for 'Journey' text 1019.2s 341.0s Time to
first Sample (10 word sentence) 195ms 41ms

On a 2-CPU system with the following configuration:
* Dual 360MHz CPU SPARC v9 Processor system
* SolarisTM 8 in 64-bit mode
* Java 2 SDK, Standard Edition, v 1.4

The results are summarized below:

Dual CPU 360MHz SPARC v9 Flite FreeTTS
Loading Time for 'Alice' text 0.0s 2.9s
Processing Time for 'Alice' text 35.7s 14.2s Loading Time for 'Journey' text
0.0s 3.8s Processing Time for 'Journey' text 842.7s 189.5s Time to first
Sample (10 word sentence) 165ms 33ms