Hi all, Thanks for your interest and for all your good questions. It seems like maybe some of you missed the link to the demos that was posted in the first email. So for those who didn't see it, I am pasting it again here for you to click and listen. I'm putting the link first so you don't miss it. But then, under that, I will endeavor to answer each of your questions as best I can. So please continue reading after clicking the link: https://www.readspeaker.com/text-to-speech-demo To Rudy: Hopefully the link in this email will give you an idea of how the voices sound. When you click it, it brings you to Readspeaker's official demo page where you can hear short samples of the voices available. If they are not long enough for you to get a sense of the flow with longer text, you can email me for some samples in mp3 format. I tried to include my email before but it just blanks out the punctuation. So I will spell out the punctuation, and you will know to just insert the actual symbols instead. My email is: software dot liberators at slmail dot me To A: If there is enough interest in this project to make it official, then the goal is to make Readspeakr voices available to any of the most widely used Distros that have Orca or Speakup. Similar to how Voxin offers Nuance voices that you can install on most Distros with screenreaders. Yes, Readspeaker does offer both Swedish and Finnish along with many other languages. Please click on the link I included at the top of this email. On that page, you will see a combo box to select your language for a demo. Scroll up in that combo box and you will find Swedish and Finnish, then, once you select the language, tab down, and press enter on "listen". To the person who suggested further platforms of usage such as Mac terminals and Linux on Windows, I appreciate the suggestion and this is certainly something to look into. Personally I only have experience with stand alone Windows, and stand alone Linux. I really don't know anything about the workings of Mac OS, but if a Mac terminal runs on Linux compatible software, then it might be possible to incorporate Readspeaker voices. However, with Mac, I'm assuming you're dealing with Apple and whatever protocols they have as a company to approve of third party TTS providers. That is an avenue that I am really not familiar with, but if anyone hear is a Mac afficionado with experience with Apple's protocols for approving third party providers, please feel free to share that knowledge with me. Mac and Windows already have so many natural sounding speech options available that I'm really focusing on trying to bring Readspeaker to Linux in particular, to give Linux users more choices for natural sounding speech. So if Apple already provides natural voices for the Mac terminal, then it may be better to focus solely on stand alone Linux systems. However, it seems that the Linux on Windows that you speak of, should be able to utilize these voices if its essentially still Linux software. I'm still open to any ideas about Mac terminal and Linux on Windows, its just that I don't have any experience with that, I don't know if there are already existing natural voices for them seeing as it seems to be Linux software but running on top of Mac or Windows, but any input on that would be great. To Chime: We might be able to request Heather if we get enough interest to get this project up and going. Although the only place where I have seen Heather utilized is in their web-reader solutions which are a bit different from their Linux compatible SDK. They do offer the option to have customized voices though, so we might be able to request Heather if we really want that. Personally, for US English I like the Julie voice which is available to demo on the Readspeaker site, as well as the Sophie voice which is what they used to record that mp3 file for Console users that you listened to. Let me know if you ever end up finding any samples of the Voxygen Hypra voices, I'd like to know what they sound like in English and I havn't found any Hypra samples either. To Debin Prater: Thanks for the input. I'm a beginner so I don't have experience with the Emacspeak servers you speak of. But if we move forward with a project with Readspeaker, the goal would be to offer the voices for the most widely used Distros that include Orca or Speakup for people to install the voices and use on their local system. I really havn't smoothed out the finite details on that as to how exactly the interface making Readspeaker available for Linux screenreaders would work in terms of the technicalities. For example, how to make it available both for Debian based systems and for something like Arch, just throwing out examples. But Voxin has done it with Nuance, so it should be doable with Readspeaker and the guys at Readspeaker are apparently willing to consider developing an interface to make it possible, as long as there is enough interest in the community, and so long as it would be commercially viable for them. My first step is to simply find out if there is any interest, which, it seems like there is a small handful here on this list that would be interested. Other Console readers might be considered as well, and would be mentioned in an official survey before actually getting started on the project, to determine what is the most popular Console screenreader for Linux users and start with that. Hopefully offering voices for Orca graphical, and at least the most widely used Console reader. I know there's quite a few Console readers out there, but we'd have to really decide where the developers at Readspeaker would focus their time and effort into making their Linux compatible interface to bring Readspeaker voices to screenreaders. I think starting with Orca for Graphical, and then one Console Reader, would be good. Havn't even gotten into Emacs yet, but if that uses a seperate screenreader and is widely used, then that would be something to consider including if possible. I'm just trying to cover the basics of something for graphical, and something for console. As far as I know, isn't Emacs like a text editor and used for programming etc? Do people also use it like a screenreader to access daily tasks on Linux instead of Orca Or Espeakup? To Didier: Wow, didn't know you also reached out to Readspeaker as an Ivona distributor back in the day. Good to know. Its too bad that something can't be done to bring Ivona to Linux seeing as one of their original pages said that an Ivona SDK was compatible. But when I asked them, I got the same response that Ivona is linked with Amazon now so Ivona is not an option. I'm not the only one to inquire. You asked them years before me, and I wouldn't be surprised if we're not the only ones to ask for Ivona. Quite frustrating that Ivona is not more open to collaborating for accessibility solutions on multiple platforms. Even from a strictly business standpoint, Ivona could make additional profits from selling solutions to Linux users. Oh well. As for the Readspeaker brand voices, when I contacted them, they did say that they usually only sell to businesses, not individuals; but they said that in this case, they would be willing to consider developing an interface to bring Readspeaker voices to Linux screenreaders provided that there is enough interest in the community, and that it would be commercially viable. Thats why I'm trying to get a baseline of interest, to see if its worthwhile to try to move forward with this. To Francisco: Yes, I totally agree with you. Thats why I started this endeavor, first trying to bring Ivona to Linux but that didn't work out. Now trying to bring Readspeaker's own brand of voices to Linux. I too want to see more natural sounding voices become available to Linux. Allowing Linux users to have a similar range of natural TTS choices as Windows users, and in return, more people may decide to give Linux a try. Thanks to all for the inquiries, hope I was able to answer at least some of your questions, feel free to keep asking questions or sharing ideas, and for those of you who missed the link the first time around, please do try listening to the demos available on Readspeaker's web page. Thanks, SL _______________________________________________ Blinux-list mailing list Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list