Hi, If the source code for Eloquence is truly lost, imho that is totally absurd. Especially since it at one time was IBM TTS or Via Voice or whatever. I mean, a big huge company like that doesn't just go around losing source code. You know somebody, somewhere, almost certainly has a copy of some version of the source. As for me, I don't like Espeak either. I personally think Eloquence is the best thing out there other than good old DECtalk. And no, don't get me on a rant about what Force Computers and Fonix did to that poor thing! When I say DECtalk, I mean DECtalk 4.3 at the latest. Jayson On 5/9/2013 7:05 PM, Littlefield, Tyler wrote: > >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 outdated and has problems, but I prefer it to the harsh headcold sound 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/ > >
