speakup using different synths with software speech?

[Tony Baechler]

Are they free and packaged for Debian?  My understanding is that you 
have to actually pay for them.  I've spent enough on hardware speech.  
I'm not about to spend money on non-free software speech in addition.  
Also, how do you use them with Speakup and Orca?

Georgina Joyce wrote:
> You didn't mention cepstral voices. 
>
> On Mon, 2009-06-01 at 11:08 -0700, Tony Baechler wrote:
>   
>> Hi,
>>
>> This is very well said. I've felt the same way for a long time which is 
>> why I still use Windows for email and ssh to my Linux machines. I would 
>> prefer to use Linux as my primary OS, but I have a few sticking points 
>> as well. The biggest is the quality of ESpeak, exactly as you say. To 
>> me, it reminds me of an Echo with a British accent. With Speakup, that 
>> isn't a big problem because I have an external Doubletalk LT, a 
>> Trippletalk and a DEC-talk Express. However, unless I'm mistaken, 
>> (someone, please correct me here) there is no way to get Orca to use 
>> hardware speech. I realize that there are better software synths out 
>> there, but either they're just as bad (look at Festival), they're 
>> non-free (Mbrola comes to mind), or they cost money, such as TTSynth. 
>> Until there is a high quality speech synth for Linux that works with 
>> Orca, I will not be completely switching.
>>