Voxin was: Re: Switching to Linux

[Kirk Reiser]

On Fri, 10 May 2013, Rob Hudson wrote:

> I agree. I am extremely hearing impaired and I can only understand about 2 
> out of 3 words when using espeak. When I heard that there was an 
> eloquence-sounding voice available for linux, I jumped at it. I didn't 
> quibble at the cost since having a nice, clear voice I could understand was 
> more important to me than six bucks. It is a crying shame that nobody's doing
> anything with the via voice or eloquence anymore, but still hanging on to the 
> source code greedily so that nobody can update it.

I understand that most everybody has a personal preference toward a
synth they find enjoyable and easy to listen to. I will just say that
speech synths are like many things in life that take practice to
become comfortible with. I have listened to many, many synths over the
years writing drivers for them and working on them directly. You can
become perfectly comfortible with any of them even the worst with
prolonged practice. The human brain is an amazing device and will over
time build the connections to accommodate even the worst synths like
the old tuxtalk or even the Braille 'n Speak synth.

> I use voxin with speech-dispatcher and speechd-up and i am able to work very 
> well in my terminal with those tools. I avoid pulseAudio like the plague 
> since from what I hear you can't have speech in console without jumping 
> through weird hoops. I don't really see what the advantage of PulseAudio is 
> anyway, except something about having per user audio settings or something 
> like that. Since I'm the only user, I don't need that, and alsa works just 
> fine.

There really doesn't need to be any jumping through hoops to bypass
pulse audio. There is a pulse audio configuration file in
/usr/share/alsa which if removed will totally ignore it. That, at
least has been my experience. I never use gnome so don't know if it
does something to complicate the situation.


-- 
Well that's it then, colour me gone!