hardware or software synths

[Kyle]

While I agree regarding the standard FestVox voices that come with Festival, it does offer a framework that allows much more understandable voices to be installed and used instead. Also, I find eSpeak to be of much higher quality, easier to understand, available at a much lower price and much better maintained than IBMTTS, ViaVoice, TTSynth, Voxin or whatever they're calling that old broken down Jaws voice these days, and that's completely putting aside for the moment that both Festival and eSpeak are completely free and open source, meaning that you have the freedom to fix what you don't like about them. Pico is also open source, although from what I understand, there is a bit of a problem making new voice data or something. Festival and eSpeak are open source, including their voice data, which is impossible to find on any hardware synthesizer at any price.
~Kyle
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