I listen to espeak for twelve or more hours a day and most of that time I'm concentrating on what I'm doing, not on how fluffy and cute the voice sounds. Mike On 10/05/2013 15:59, John G. Heim wrote: > As someone who uses voxin 8 to 10 hours a day, my opinion is that the > problems you mention below are minor compared to the clarity and > responsiveness of voxin. > > It only costs six bucks. If you have to listen to your workstation for > 8 to 10 hours a day, it's well worth it. > > > > > > n 05/09/13 17:57, 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 making a profit from licensing something so outdated, broken and 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/ >> > -- Michael A. Ray Analyst/Programmer Witley, Surrey, South-east UK Interested in accessibility on the Raspberry Pi? Visit: http://www.raspberryvi.org/ From where you can join our mailing list for visually-impaired Pi hackers
