Right on, Jacob. But, there is another software synth that's worth the money, and it's less money than software DEC Talk. Go check out the Linux voices available at http://www.cepstral.com. Cepstral are the commercial side of Festival and Flite, by the way. Jacob Schmude writes: > From: "Jacob Schmude" <jschmude at adelphia.net> > > Hi > Honestly, I'd recommend a hardware solution at this point. There are 16k voices out there for festival, flite and freetts. However, that doesn't necessarily > have anything at all to do with the quality of the voice. Festival, flite, and freetts (software synthesizers) all use the same basic voices. These voices are, in > my opinion, terrible. Oh, they're clear due to there being 16K, but their inflection is almost nonexistant and, due to the pronunciation they use, they tend to be > difficult to understand. You can get the software synths and voices at: > festival: http://www.festvox.org/ > flite (festival lite): http://cmuflite.org > freetts (java-based speech engine) http://freetts.sf.net/ > As of right now, festival is the only software synthesizer supposedly supported by speakup 1.5. I say supposedly because I've never gotten it working > satisfactorily. You need to apply a patch and run an add-on daemon, but it's incredibly slow to respond, doesn't allow changing of voice parameters like rate > and pitch, and hasn't been updated or changed since april according to the filename. You can get the patch at: > http://users.wpi.edu/~blinux > if you want to try it. > IMHO, the only good linux software synth is software dectalk, but that costs $50 and speakup doesn't work with it yet. Hint, hint, speakup developers? Any > chance it'll ever be supported? > If you need help getting the software synthesizer working, let me know. It can be a bit of work, especially if you're going to try festival. Software Speech is > one of the two major areas in which linux lags behind, I think, the other being OCR. > HTH > On Wed, 17 Sep 2003 23:12:47 -0400, Sina Bahram wrote: > > >Hello, I read a few earlier posts on this and other lists about some 16k > >voices availible for linux. I was wondering what would be availible, and > >if 16k voices are truly the highest quality availible these days. > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Speakup mailing list > Speakup at braille.uwo.ca > http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup -- Janina Sajka, Director Technology Research and Development Governmental Relations Group American Foundation for the Blind (AFB) Email: janina at afb.net Phone: (202) 408-8175
