Not lost. Problem is that it has a lot of owners, i.e. people/corporations who own a piece of it. Getting a rebuild, especially with enhancements, would take a firm of lawyers just to get the project started. Janina Jayson Smith writes: > 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outdated and has problems, but I prefer it to the harsh headcold 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/ > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Speakup mailing list > Speakup at linux-speakup.org > http://linux-speakup.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/speakup -- Janina Sajka, Phone: +1.443.300.2200 sip:janina at asterisk.rednote.net Email: janina at rednote.net Linux Foundation Fellow Executive Chair, Accessibility Workgroup: http://a11y.org The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Chair, Protocols & Formats http://www.w3.org/wai/pf Indie UI http://www.w3.org/WAI/IndieUI/
