speakup using different synths with software speech?

[Lorenzo Taylor]

I use Audacity here. It's much better than anything I ever used on Windows, 
although it does work there as well. As for cutting off speech, there are a 
couple of things you can do. Firstly, Orca has the ability to silence speech by 
holding down the modifier key, usually the keypad insert key or the caps lock 
key and pressing s. The speech comes back if you press the same combination 
again. Also, if you want the benefits of hardware speech without the cost, try a 
USB sound card such as a Soundblaster mp3. I use this as an example because 
that's the one I have and it works quite well here. Using Pulseaudio, you can 
play the speech, system sounds and whatever else on one device and edit your 
audio using Audacity on the other device. Pulseaudio also helps the volume issue 
where the speech always seems to be quieter than the mp3 you may be playing at 
the same time. You can use the Pulseaudio volume control to adjust the volume of 
every sound on your system. So if the music is too loud, you can easily turn it 
down, or if you need the speech louder, you can turn it up. This is the same 
system you can use to move sound from one device to another. You just use the 
right-click menu on the sound you want to move instead of adjusting the volume.

As for trying Voxin, although the price is quite reasonable, Voxin is just 
another packaged version of a very old speech synthesizer that hasn't been 
updated in about 7 or 8 years and depends on libraries that were somewhat 
outdated even then. So far, the Voxin team has been able to force it to work, 
but they will never be able to guarantee how much longer it will work. The 
libraries that the underlying synthesizer are linked against grow more and more 
obsolete with each passing day, and the source is not available to anyone, so 
even the Voxin package maintainers are unable to rebuild it against newer system 
libraries. Frankly, I'm quite surprised that they have been able to force it to 
work anywhere near this long, and it's only a matter of time before it will stop 
working with no hope of ever speaking again. My suggestion would be to use 
eSpeak and please, please, please report any problems you may have with it, and 
if you are skilled as a programmer, correct what you can. I personally find 
eSpeak much easier to listen to for much longer periods of time than DECtalk, 
Voxin/Eloquence/ViaVoice/IBMTTS/TTSynth/whatever it's called from one minute to 
the next or any hardware synthesizer I ever heard, not to mention the fact that 
it is free as in speech and beer. About the only things that sound better to me 
are the so-called human sounding synthesizers, but they are nonfree and take 
tons and tons of memory. They are also nearly incapable of producing 
intelligible speech at over 200 words per minute, so eSpeak is still the best 
choice if you need something that can be understood at high speeds.

Pacon kaj longan vivon, (Peace and long life),
Lorenzo
-- 
Nia diligenta kolegaro
En laboro paca ne laciĝos,
Ĝis la bela sonĝo de l' homaro
Por eterna ben' efektiviĝos.
--La Espero, himno de Esperanto