>but I guess that's no different from what Microsoft has been >doing for years <smile> yeah... totally. Now if you had any clue what you were talking about short of the usual windows bashing on a Linux list, we might actually be able to take you seriously. Also I honestly see nothing wrong with voxen/eloquence. Sure it is outdated and has problems, but I prefer it to the harsh headcold sound of ESpeak. It's a matter of preference that doesn't exactly set voxen or espeak above one or the other. On 5/9/2013 4:57 PM, Kyle wrote: > According to Brandon McGinty-Carroll: > # As I recall, voxen requires /dev/dsp or somesuch ancient sound API. > > As far as I know, this is correct, but it's a lot worse than that. Not > only does Voxin require an ancient sound API, but it also requires > ancient C libraries in order to function. The source code is either lost > or is otherwise unavailable even to those who would maintain it, so it > can't even be rebuilt against the latest C libraries or even get any of > its numerous bugs fixed. It still crashes on words like c a e s u r e, > which according to Google is a bitcoin client written in Python, and is > also a rather common username on some non-blindness related forums. It > also crashes on a rather common OCR error when recognizing the word > Wednesday. I googled that one as well, and turns out it is a very common > OCR scanning error, especially when scanning newspapers. I was > especially seeing it in scanned newspaper archives from the late 1800's > and early 1900's. There are also reports of random crashes that cause > Voxin and other speech synthesis engines with the exact same codebase > but different names to randomly kill the screen reader, and there is > nothing anyone can do about it, because the source code is not available > or is lost. Worse still is the fact that many companies are actually > making a profit from licensing something so outdated, broken and > unstable, but I guess that's no different from what Microsoft has been > doing for years <smile>. It may fall on deaf ears for some reason, but > my recommendation is to avoid Voxin and all the other voices like it. > Use eSpeak, because it ships with most distros and just works. If you > don't like the way eSpeak sounds, you can still get festival working, > and Festival is capable of running some amazing free voices. There's > also Pico, which is now supported natively in speech-dispatcher. All > these voices sound better and work better than Voxin, which literally > makes my head hurt. > ~Kyle > http://kyle.tk/ -- Take care, Ty http://tds-solutions.net He that will not reason is a bigot; he that cannot reason is a fool; he that dares not reason is a slave. Sent from my Toaster (tm).
