hardware or software synths

[Kyle]

It is more practical, higher quality and more easily understandable to use software speech with a USB sound device these days, unless you are guaranteed a machine with a serial port and just happen to have an old hardware speech synthesizer laying around somewhere that you either already purchased or someone let you have on the cheap. It will take a bit of extra work to get all non-speech sounds playing through onboard sound and only speech playing through the USB device, but the price to do this is somewhere between 5 and 10 dollars rather than 50, 100 or even 1000 dollars or more, depending on the hardware synthesizer you happen to be able to purchase that is old enough to support a standard serial port. To be honest, although it is good to have hardware speech, especially since it comes up talking much earlier in the boot process, there just isn't a market for dedicated hardware speech at any price for any OS. There is, however, still a rather large market for USB headsets and
other similar devices, which can be purchased for as little as about $3 and certainly no more than $50, and these have the attitional advantage of being usable on any machine that has a USB port.
~Kyle
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