All, There still seems to be misunderstandings on what I'm trying to say. Again, I really don't mind paying a reasonable amount for software speech, assuming I can afford it. The problem is that I've never yet heard software speech that I liked. The other problem is that I don't like using non-free software but I don't think I could get used to ESpeak. My favorite voice is the hardware DEC-talk Express. I can use it to read books, email, work on my other Linux boxes, etc. I can listen to it for hours without growing tired of it. It has a very fast speech rate while still being understandable. It doesn't have a muffle like most software synths, specifically the software DEC-talk. It can easily be customized to have the exact pitch and inflection I want. When I bought it, it was around $1200 US and is still worth it, even though the price dropped since then. I understand that the USB version isn't as flexible. I've tried many different sets of speakrs for software speech, but all either have too much bass, a muffle or static. Probably the best for reading was Realspeak but it was very, very slow. I've even tried software speech on a high-end stereo system. That did help, but it still wasn't as good as my old DEC-talk Express. I guess my next favorite would be the Trippletalk, but it mispronounces things and has other problems, like stuttering and a fairly small text buffer. One really great thing about the DEC Express is that if I'm reading and the power goes out, it stores at least two screens of text in its buffer, so it will keep reading for a few minutes. As I said, I'll look at Voxin. Perhaps it's not as bad as I think. I know speakers do have a lot to do with it and it's partially what I'm used to, but what I really want is to just use my hardware synthesizers. Software speech is enough of an issue for me that I have put off really exploring Orca. Also, one thing not mentioned here is my other reason for not leaving Windows. That is a lack of GUI audio software. I'm surprised that no one else has pointed this out, but a really big problem with software speech and audio production is that you don't want speech in your recordings. Even if you have multiple sound cards or a good multichannel card, a good microphone will still pick up software speech, I know from experience. Even if you use headsets, it's still very inconvenient when you're doing restoration and editing to hear speech in your ears at the same time as the sound you're concentrating on. I work with old time radio shows which have many pops and clicks. It's hard to hear the disc noise with speech chattering away in my ears. On the other hand, with hardware speech I can't hear it at all with a headset on, but at least I don't have to repeat the same half second of sound multiple times because the speech wouldn't shut up. That's the problem I'm having now on a Windows machine with only software speech. I'm sure there's an easy solution, but the volume of all software synths seems to dominate all other sound, even if the volume is lowered. Michael Whapples wrote: > As for voxin, if you weren't pleased by eloquence, you are unlikely to > be pleased with voxin as it uses IBM viavoice which sounds the same as > eloquence (or at least very close, I think the voices are very > slightly different). > > As for contributing to espeak, you could suggest how it could sound > better, it may not require altering the actual code it may be a matter > of altering the voice files. I don't mean it in a bad way, but you > seem to be hard to please with speech output, it may help if we knew > what makes a voice good to you.
