Hi all, Apparently my position was unclear. I'm aware of Voxin and I might look at it, although I understand that it requires older libraries and can be difficult to set up. I'm on x86-64 and I don't know if there is a 64-bit version. I really don't mind paying for software speech in principle. The simple fact is that I don't like any software speech, regardless of what it is. I've used RealSpeak, Eloquence, ESpeak, Festival, AT&T Flextalk, and the software DEC-talk. I really didn't like any of them, although some were tolerable. They all have a high memory and CPU overhead which hardware doesn't. I wouldn't be opposed to contributing somehow to ESpeak, but I really don't have the money (see my previous post) and I'm not a programmer. I'm really not sure what I could do. It seems to work well enough, so it isn't like there are bugs to report. The documentation seems fine, at least I had no problem using it with NVDA, Orca or ESpeakup. I am not trying to complain specifically about ESpeak, my comments generally apply to all software speech. I don't think I could get used to the ESpeak voice for hours at a time though. Finally, if I did spend a fairly large amount of money on software, whether it's speech or something else, I would want it to be open source. Yes, the GPL does allow companies to charge for software, as long as the source is included. I'll probably never use the source, but at least I could recompile it on whatever system I'm using, such as Debian Lenny on x86-64. So, unless I'm mistaken, not only is the software itself non-free, but they want money for it besides and it still is not and never will be free software. Surely people here can understand why I would not want to use non-free software, regardless of how much money is involved. No, this really isn't about paying for Windows, and only somewhat about the money involved. Yes, call it my prospectives or my principles, but I will not use software speech under those conditions. If it comes down to using non-free software speech on Linux or using good hardware speech on Windows, since the dealer installed Windows for me already and as such it doesn't cost me anything, I'll keep using my old Windows 98 until it dies. I can afford to wait a long time for a free alternative for Linux to come along. One last question on Orca and hardware speech. I've used the DEC Express with Emacspeak before, so I know it works and is supported. I don't know anything about speech servers though. Would Orca support that? What about the Doubletalk LT, which I think is also supported by Emacspeak? Michael Whapples wrote: > Firstly orca and hardware synths: > I think some are supported via emacspeak speech servers. I don't know > how well this works and I believe it is limited to certain synths. > > As for free software speech: > I have to say it is a bit of either take what is there (eg. espeak) or > pay your money for better. Voxin as I remember don't charge a huge > amount, it was about 5 euros when I bought it, really not much if the > quality of the speech is so important to you. > > The alternative is to try and help work on better speech synthesisers > and bring something better forward and make that free software.
