TTSynth Is Available Again

[Doug Sutherland]

Luke said:
While making a tarball would be easy, the person using it would  have to
be sure they had the libstdc++-libc6.2-2.so.3 shared library, which is
 from gcc 2.95. Luckily, Ubuntu/Debian and Fedora still carry this, but I
 doubt very much whether other distros do, and it would certainly not be
 trivial to build it.

Doug adds:
It's not trivial but it is doable. I have in fact done exactly that with the
ibm tts in the past, both on LFS and slackware. It does take some
considerable work, because we're talking raw guts of toolchain here.
There various parts of toolchain of specific version that are known to
work with specific versions of the other parts, like any given gcc will
work with some version of binutils and glibc etc. But I can say it is
doable and satisfying to get it done. It is also an opportunity to use
the knowledge gained in LFS toolchain build to good use. It is even
possible to actually have two different glibc versions on a system.
I wish I would have kept specific notes on what I did, but oh well.
Actually some of my notes may be in the archives of this list, I seem
to recall posting at least some info about what I did to make it work.
After changing distros, kernels, versions, etc so many times I gave
up on ibm tts, but I really do love that product. It's a shame that
ibm gave up on it, I recall an IBM engineer explaining that they
spent millions on it and could not keep doing that for free. I think
however that most of that work was on the recogniton part. The
tts was tiny compared to the recognition engine and it was clear
that their focus was on recognition. They were and are a bit out
of touch because tts has much more direct useful application
while the recognition was not worth it for me, it was cool to
play with but not accurate. It seems they have since shifted their
efforts in two other directions instead of regular old linux, they
focused on speech on embedded systems, and rolled their
speech strategy into websphere, where they make gazillions
of dollars selling to big enterprise. I suppose we should just
be glad that linux work is still available. It was a strange idea
how they did the tts, you could buy it .. or not. It was free
but you could buy it! And they wondered why nobody did.
Still chuckling over that.

  -- Doug