Your going to have to pay for something. My origenal goal, and still is is to move to linux full-time. If that means that I pay for a software synth that elimenates the headache of speakup, I'm willing to do so. As for your cpu overhead, the synths don't add much cpu overhead. I think jaws and it's processing actually adds more than the synth does by its self. Even paying $100 for software synth seems trivial to paying $300+ for a hardware synth, which is the cheapest I've seen. Braille N Speak costs like $500 referbished from fs, and that's out of date. Thanks, Tyler Littlefield Web: tysdomain.com email: tyler at tysdomain.com My programs don't have bugs, they're called randomly added features. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Tony Baechler" <tony@xxxxxxxxxxxx> To: "Speakup is a screen review system for Linux." <speakup at braille.uwo.ca> Sent: Thursday, June 04, 2009 5:29 AM Subject: Re: speakup using different synths with software speech? > 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. > > _______________________________________________ > Speakup mailing list > Speakup at braille.uwo.ca > http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
