speakup using different synths with software speech?

[Kerry Hoath]

    One of the things that people should remember is all the comercial 
speech generation algorythms have patents on them which prevent 
redistribution.
this is why someone could not just clone eloquence dectalk or whatever.

Mbrola has good voice quality, and is far more human sounding than espeak 
although it is tricky to set up.
Festival isn't bad but also requires speech dispatcher.

Licenses of festival and mbrola are not gpl at least they aren't for the 
voices anyway.

I'm sure Jonathan duddington (sorry if I can't spell your name mate) would 
accept any constructive help in improving how his speech synthesizer sounds, 
especially to make it more human.
Regards, Kerry.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "James Homuth" <james at the-jdh.com>
To: "'Speakup is a screen review system for Linux.'" 
<speakup at braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Monday, June 01, 2009 10:21 PM
Subject: RE: speakup using different synths with software speech?


Thanks for that information, as much as it doesn't really answer the
question except to say if you want improvement, use another synth. Is that
to mean we won't be seeing any such improvements with Espeak?

-----Original Message-----
From: speakup-bounces at braille.uwo.ca [mailto:speakup-bounces at braille.uwo.ca]
On Behalf Of Willem van der Walt
Sent: June 1, 2009 3:38 AM
To: Speakup is a screen review system for Linux.
Subject: RE: speakup using different synths with software speech?

There is a way to use mbrola voices with espeak.  It is more human-sounding,
but getting used to espeak standard voice does not take long.
Regards, Willem


On Sun, 31 May 2009, James Homuth wrote:

> Somewhat related, what's the likelyhood of Espeak voices getting
> improvements to be more... I'm not sure what the word for it is, other
> than human-sounding? That's been one of my main sticking points for
> why I'm still with Windows on my primary machine; that, plus I've not
> until now had time to test the accessibility of my particular
> preferred distribution. I did hear a demonstration a while back of a
> version of Espeak, and while I could definitely get used to it, I
> think I'd like it a whole lot better if it didn't sound quite as
> robotic. I'm not saying it should equal eloquence by any means, but
> the demo I heard kind of reminded me of the old Echo synths used on
> the early Apple computers. Good, but could be better, IMHO. Anyway,
> this was more a rambling/curiosity thing and by no means an attempt at
> criticism as I've not actually gotten it running locally yet, so for all I
know my version of Espeak could already be improved over the demo I heard.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: speakup-bounces at braille.uwo.ca
> [mailto:speakup-bounces at braille.uwo.ca]
> On Behalf Of Hermann
> Sent: May 31, 2009 3:59 PM
> To: Speakup is a screen review system for Linux.
> Subject: Re: speakup using different synths with software speech?
>
> am So 31. Mai 2009 um 21:31:02 schrieb William Hubbs
<w.d.hubbs at gmail.com>:
> > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> > Hash: SHA1
> >
> > Tyler,
> >
> > I recommend getting used to espeak.  The version of eloquence on
> > linux is old, buggy, and they are not planning to upgrade it.
> >
> He can look here:
> http://voxin.oralux.net/index.php#main
> I've bought a rather new version there a few months ago.
> Works pretty well, but to use it with Speakup Speech-Dispatcher is
required.
> Note: Maybe the Emacspeak-server works as well; I remember having seen
> something in the install script.
> Hermann
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