Voxin was: Re: Switching to Linux

[Jason White]

Tony Baechler <tony at baechler.net> wrote:
 
> Thank you for mentioning this!  That was the point I was trying to make,
> but I wasn't sure how to put it.  No, I don't see it becoming open source
> any time soon.  It would be better to either rewrite something already out
> there or write something from scratch, such as what was done with ESpeak.
>  Say what you want about the quality of the voice, but ESpeak still
> remains the only truly open source solution in active development which
> doesn't crash and is very responsive.  The Festival voices seem to be
> abandoned if I understand correctly.  Mbrola isn't bad, but it is non-free
> and is also not further developed.

Mary TTS is being developed - I don't know about responsiveness though.
> 
> With that said, I know very little about Voxin or whatever you want to
> call it except that Oralux probably shouldn't legally be packaging it,
> which is another reason why I wouldn't buy it.  

I think they simply bought a large number of licences from IBM. Of course,
given that IBM et al., apparently aren't working on it anymore, any licence
revenue they receive, for any operating system, is 100% profit at this point.

If you want to buy out a proprietary synthesizer  (crowd source the funding for example), I don't think this is a good candidate, and the money would be better contributed to a development effort around a newer synthesizer anyway.