Voxin was: Re: Switching to Linux

[Littlefield, Tyler]

 >but I guess that's no different from what Microsoft has been
 >doing for years <smile>
yeah... totally. Now if you had any clue what you were talking about 
short of the usual windows bashing on a Linux list, we might actually be 
able to take you seriously.

Also I honestly see nothing wrong with voxen/eloquence. Sure it is 
outdated and has problems, but I prefer it to the harsh headcold sound 
of ESpeak. It's a matter of preference that doesn't exactly set voxen or 
espeak above one or the other.
On 5/9/2013 4:57 PM, Kyle wrote:
> According to Brandon McGinty-Carroll:
> # As I recall, voxen requires /dev/dsp or somesuch ancient sound API.
>
> As far as I know, this is correct, but it's a lot worse than that. Not
> only does Voxin require an ancient sound API, but it also requires
> ancient C libraries in order to function. The source code is either lost
> or is otherwise unavailable even to those who would maintain it, so it
> can't even be rebuilt against the latest C libraries or even get any of
> its numerous bugs fixed. It still crashes on words like c a e s u r e,
> which according to Google is a bitcoin client written in Python, and is
> also a rather common username on some non-blindness related forums. It
> also crashes on a rather common OCR error when recognizing the word
> Wednesday. I googled that one as well, and turns out it is a very common
> OCR scanning error, especially when scanning newspapers. I was
> especially seeing it in scanned newspaper archives from the late 1800's
> and early 1900's. There are also reports of random crashes that cause
> Voxin and other speech synthesis engines with the exact same codebase
> but different names to randomly kill the screen reader, and there is
> nothing anyone can do about it, because the source code is not available
> or is lost. Worse still is the fact that many companies are actually
> making a profit from licensing something so outdated, broken and
> unstable, but I guess that's no different from what Microsoft has been
> doing for years <smile>. It may fall on deaf ears for some reason, but
> my recommendation is to avoid Voxin and all the other voices like it.
> Use eSpeak, because it ships with most distros and just works. If you
> don't like the way eSpeak sounds, you can still get festival working,
> and Festival is capable of running some amazing free voices. There's
> also Pico, which is now supported natively in speech-dispatcher. All
> these voices sound better and work better than Voxin, which literally
> makes my head hurt.
> ~Kyle
> http://kyle.tk/


-- 
Take care,
Ty
http://tds-solutions.net
He that will not reason is a bigot; he that cannot reason is a fool; he that dares not reason is a slave.
Sent from my Toaster (tm).