speakup using different synths with software speech?

[Michael Whapples]

Firstly orca and hardware synths:
I think some are supported via emacspeak speech servers. I don't know 
how well this works and I believe it is limited to certain synths.

As for free software speech:
I have to say it is a bit of either take what is there (eg. espeak) or 
pay your money for better. Voxin as I remember don't charge a huge 
amount, it was about 5 euros when I bought it, really not much if the 
quality of the speech is so important to you.

The alternative is to try and help work on better speech synthesisers 
and bring something better forward and make that free software.

Personally I feel espeak is far better than anything in the past which 
was opensource and makes software speech on a fully opensource system 
viable.

Michael Whapples
On -10/01/37 20:59, Tony Baechler wrote:
> <div class="moz-text-flowed" style="font-family: -moz-fixed">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.
>
>
>
> </div>