speakup using different synths with software speech?

[Tony Baechler]

Hi all,

Apparently my position was unclear.  I'm aware of Voxin and I might look 
at it, although I understand that it requires older libraries and can be 
difficult to set up.  I'm on x86-64 and I don't know if there is a 
64-bit version.  I really don't mind paying for software speech in 
principle.  The simple fact is that I don't like any software speech, 
regardless of what it is.  I've used RealSpeak, Eloquence, ESpeak, 
Festival, AT&T Flextalk, and the software DEC-talk.  I really didn't 
like any of them, although some were tolerable.  They all have a high 
memory and CPU overhead which hardware doesn't.

I wouldn't be opposed to contributing somehow to ESpeak, but I really 
don't have the money (see my previous post) and I'm not a programmer.  
I'm really not sure what I could do.  It seems to work well enough, so 
it isn't like there are bugs to report.  The documentation seems fine, 
at least I had no problem using it with NVDA, Orca or ESpeakup.  I am 
not trying to complain specifically about ESpeak, my comments generally 
apply to all software speech.  I don't think I could get used to the 
ESpeak voice for hours at a time though.

Finally, if I did spend a fairly large amount of money on software, 
whether it's speech or something else, I would want it to be open 
source.  Yes, the GPL does allow companies to charge for software, as 
long as the source is included.  I'll probably never use the source, but 
at least I could recompile it on whatever system I'm using, such as 
Debian Lenny on x86-64.  So, unless I'm mistaken, not only is the 
software itself non-free, but they want money for it besides and it 
still is not and never will be free software.  Surely people here can 
understand why I would not want to use non-free software, regardless of 
how much money is involved.  No, this really isn't about paying for 
Windows, and only somewhat about the money involved.  Yes, call it my 
prospectives or my principles, but I will not use software speech under 
those conditions.  If it comes down to using non-free software speech on 
Linux or using good hardware speech on Windows, since the dealer 
installed Windows for me already and as such it doesn't cost me 
anything, I'll keep using my old Windows 98 until it dies.  I can afford 
to wait a long time for a free alternative for Linux to come along.

One last question on Orca and hardware speech.  I've used the DEC 
Express with Emacspeak before, so I know it works and is supported.  I 
don't know anything about speech servers though.  Would Orca support 
that?  What about the Doubletalk LT, which I think is also supported by 
Emacspeak?

Michael Whapples wrote:
> 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.