Voxin was: Re: Switching to Linux

[Jayson Smith]

Hi,

If the source code for Eloquence is truly lost, imho that is totally 
absurd. Especially since it at one time was IBM TTS or Via Voice or 
whatever. I mean, a big huge company like that doesn't just go around 
losing source code. You know somebody, somewhere, almost certainly has a 
copy of some version of the source.

As for me, I don't like Espeak either. I personally think Eloquence is 
the best thing out there other than good old DECtalk. And no, don't get 
me on a rant about what Force Computers and Fonix did to that poor 
thing! When I say DECtalk, I mean DECtalk 4.3 at the latest.
Jayson

On 5/9/2013 7:05 PM, Littlefield, Tyler wrote:
> >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 outdated and has problems, but I prefer it to the harsh headcold sound 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/
>
>