speakup using different synths with software speech?

[Tony Baechler]

All,

There still seems to be misunderstandings on what I'm trying to say.  
Again, I really don't mind paying a reasonable amount for software 
speech, assuming I can afford it.  The problem is that I've never yet 
heard software speech that I liked.  The other problem is that I don't 
like using non-free software but I don't think I could get used to 
ESpeak.  My favorite voice is the hardware DEC-talk Express.  I can use 
it to read books, email, work on my other Linux boxes, etc.  I can 
listen to it for hours without growing tired of it.  It has a very fast 
speech rate while still being understandable.  It doesn't have a muffle 
like most software synths, specifically the software DEC-talk.  It can 
easily be customized to have the exact pitch and inflection I want.  
When I bought it, it was around $1200 US and is still worth it, even 
though the price dropped since then.  I understand that the USB version 
isn't as flexible.  I've tried many different sets of speakrs for 
software speech, but all either have too much bass, a muffle or static.  
Probably the best for reading was Realspeak but it was very, very slow.  
I've even tried software speech on a high-end stereo system.  That did 
help, but it still wasn't as good as my old DEC-talk Express.  I guess 
my next favorite would be the Trippletalk, but it mispronounces things 
and has other problems, like stuttering and a fairly small text buffer.  
One really great thing about the DEC Express is that if I'm reading and 
the power goes out, it stores at least two screens of text in its 
buffer, so it will keep reading for a few minutes.

As I said, I'll look at Voxin.  Perhaps it's not as bad as I think.  I 
know speakers do have a lot to do with it and it's partially what I'm 
used to, but what I really want is to just use my hardware 
synthesizers.  Software speech is enough of an issue for me that I have 
put off really exploring Orca.

Also, one thing not mentioned here is my other reason for not leaving 
Windows.  That is a lack of GUI audio software.  I'm surprised that no 
one else has pointed this out, but a really big problem with software 
speech and audio production is that you don't want speech in your 
recordings.  Even if you have multiple sound cards or a good 
multichannel card, a good microphone will still pick up software speech, 
I know from experience.  Even if you use headsets, it's still very 
inconvenient when you're doing restoration and editing to hear speech in 
your ears at the same time as the sound you're concentrating on.  I work 
with old time radio shows which have many pops and clicks.  It's hard to 
hear the disc noise with speech chattering away in my ears.  On the 
other hand, with hardware speech I can't hear it at all with a headset 
on, but at least I don't have to repeat the same half second of sound 
multiple times because the speech wouldn't shut up.  That's the problem 
I'm having now on a Windows machine with only software speech.  I'm sure 
there's an easy solution, but the volume of all software synths seems to 
dominate all other sound, even if the volume is lowered.

Michael Whapples wrote:
> As for voxin, if you weren't pleased by eloquence, you are unlikely to 
> be pleased with voxin as it uses IBM viavoice which sounds the same as 
> eloquence (or at least very close, I think the voices are very 
> slightly different).
>
> As for contributing to espeak, you could suggest how it could sound 
> better, it may not require altering the actual code it may be a matter 
> of altering the voice files. I don't mean it in a bad way, but you 
> seem to be hard to please with speech output, it may help if we knew 
> what makes a voice good to you.