speakup using different synths with software speech?

[Tyler Littlefield]

Your going to have to pay for something. My origenal goal, and still is is 
to move to linux full-time. If that means that I pay for a software synth 
that elimenates the headache of speakup, I'm willing to do so.
As for your cpu overhead, the synths don't add much cpu overhead. I think 
jaws and it's processing actually adds more than the synth does by its self.
Even paying $100 for software synth seems trivial to paying $300+ for a 
hardware synth, which is the cheapest I've seen. Braille N Speak costs like 
$500 referbished from fs, and that's out of date.


Thanks,
Tyler Littlefield
Web: tysdomain.com
email: tyler at tysdomain.com
My programs don't have bugs, they're called randomly added features.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Tony Baechler" <tony at baechler.net>
To: "Speakup is a screen review system for Linux." <speakup at braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Thursday, June 04, 2009 5:29 AM
Subject: Re: speakup using different synths with software speech?


> 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.
>
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