hardware or software synths

[Kyle]

As for new high quality open source voices, there is hope. Google TTS as used in Android 4.0 is available under the Apache license and uses BSD licensed voice data provided by the Nagoya Institute of Technology. I'm not sure about the tools to create new voices, but this could become another option, since I would guess that getting the voices running on Linux shouldn't be difficult. I am guessing that the latest Google voices should be just as free, and from what I have heard, they sound even better, and are likely some of the best voices in terms of quality and responsiveness currently available So yes, new open source speech synthesis tsoftware is being created, and the existing software will also be improved. We won't only have Festival, eSpeak and Pico forever. In fact, it shouldn't take long at all to have something even better.
~Kyle
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