A synthesizer analogy

[Jonathan Duddington]

In article <20060518135129.GB2854 at lnx3.holmesgrown.com>,
   Steve Holmes <steve at holmesgrown.com> wrote:

> [eSpeak] seems a bit choppy but the basic pronunciation is really
> clear and it seemed to be pretty responsive from the little I played
> with it.

Yes.
eSpeak doesn't pretend to sound natural or smooth or as human as the
large commercial synthesizers, or the better Festival voices.  After
all, it's only 380 kBytes.  But I did aim to make the pronunciation
clear.  Perhaps unnaturally so.

To use an analogy, a good quality speech synthesizer is like a
photograph (a large bitmap graphic file), whereas eSpeak is like a
drawing or vector graphics.