hardware or software synths

[Jason White]

Kyle  <speakup at braille.uwo.ca> wrote:
>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. 

The sources of the voice files are available but the tools to convert them to
binary files exist only as MS-Windows executables. these don't include the
machine learning algorithms needed to build new voices.

there is a need for better-quality free/opens-ource speech synthesis software.
Either someone will write it, or someone will release a previously proprietary
system under an open licence.