Voxin was: Re: Switching to Linux

[Janina Sajka]

Not lost. Problem is that it has a lot of owners, i.e.
people/corporations who own a piece of it. Getting a rebuild, especially
with enhancements, would take a firm of lawyers just to get the project
started.

Janina

Jayson Smith writes:
> 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outdated and has problems, but I prefer it to the harsh headcold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/
> >
> >
> 
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-- 

Janina Sajka,	Phone:	+1.443.300.2200
			sip:janina at asterisk.rednote.net
		Email:	janina at rednote.net

Linux Foundation Fellow
Executive Chair, Accessibility Workgroup:	http://a11y.org

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
Chair,	Protocols & Formats	http://www.w3.org/wai/pf
	Indie UI			http://www.w3.org/WAI/IndieUI/