Voxin was: Re: Switching to Linux

[Tony Baechler]

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John, I pretty much agree with your point.  I personally don't have an
issue with paying $6 for a synth.  My issue is that it's totally non-free
and the source is apparently gone, so problems like it only being 32-bit
and requireing ancient libraries will never be fixed.  I'm hoping that one
of the newer synths discussed here will eventually replace it for people
who insist on using it.  I'm not surprised that you would have a sluggish
speech experience with Voxin as I had a similar problem with Vinux and
Festival.  I think it has something to do with Speech-Dispatcher.  That,
by the way, is one of the reasons why I haven't jumped into X with both
feet.  I just can't give up my hardware speech.  As Jayson said, DECtalk
is still the best.  Compared to that, I don't like any software speech and
I've heard lots of them.  Even putting stability and open source issues
aside, regardless of operating system, I've never heard a software voice
that I could stand for more than an hour or two.  On Windows, the trend
seems to be a high quality female voice.  I don't like them either and I
end up slowing them way down to make them understandable, thus losing any
productivity advantage.

On 5/10/2013 9:16 AM, John G. Heim wrote:
> First of all, confort isn't "fluff". Do you think it doesn't matter
> what the temperature of your office is? What if they took away your
> chair and made you stand all day?  If someone want to spend six buck
> for the sheer comfort they get from voxin it would make sense.
> 
> Secondly, I can understand more from boxin at a higher speech rate than
> I can with espeak. Most likely, when people are reporting that they
> find voxin easier to listen too, what they really mean is that they can
> understand it better. The reason they get tired listening to espeak is
> that they are straining to understand it. If you find espeak easier to
> understand, that's fine. But it's silly to dismiss the quality of the
> synthesized voice as meaningless.
> 
> If you're going to say the quality of the voice doesn't matter, you're
> going to go against just every review of every hardware speech
> synthesizer ever written. Everybody cares about the quality of the
> synthesized voice.
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