software speech

[Tony Baechler]

On 12/5/2015 10:46 AM, Karen Lewellen wrote:
> but why?
> There are many hardware synthesizers with far better voice quality.  Even
> models that were available in USB.
> why on earth should anyone be expected to have poor quality speech when the
> tools  exist otherwise?
> Not that I am a windows user,  or a Linux one either of course smiles.
> Kare


Hi, I couldn't agree with you more.  It makes good sense to me.  I like my 
DECtalk Express and that's part of why I haven't switched to NVDA.  I think 
you should ask the developers.  It wouldn't be hard to implement serial 
synth support.  Maybe the Speakup drivers could be adapted, but NVDA is 
written in Python so probably not.  As mentioned, I looked at the Braille 
driver and it didn't look too difficult.  The only thing I can think of is 
each hardware synth is different and manuals are hard to come by, not to 
mention that most people don't use them anymore.  Lots of machines don't 
come with serial ports.  I don't know about USB synths.  Unlike with 
software synths, every hardware synth has its own sets of commands, voices, 
pitch, rate and volume settings, etc.  With SAPI, it's a standard, so no 
matter what voice you're using, the programming is the same.  Finally, in 
the old days, computers weren't powerful enough to run software speech 
effectively, but that's no longer the case.  Now, for most people, it makes 
more sense to not carry around an external synth or take up a PCI slot when 
a good sound card and speakers do the same thing.  Now, software speech is 
very responsive in most cases.