Tony Baechler <tony at baechler.net> wrote: > Thank you for mentioning this! That was the point I was trying to make, > but I wasn't sure how to put it. No, I don't see it becoming open source > any time soon. It would be better to either rewrite something already out > there or write something from scratch, such as what was done with ESpeak. > Say what you want about the quality of the voice, but ESpeak still > remains the only truly open source solution in active development which > doesn't crash and is very responsive. The Festival voices seem to be > abandoned if I understand correctly. Mbrola isn't bad, but it is non-free > and is also not further developed. Mary TTS is being developed - I don't know about responsiveness though. > > With that said, I know very little about Voxin or whatever you want to > call it except that Oralux probably shouldn't legally be packaging it, > which is another reason why I wouldn't buy it. I think they simply bought a large number of licences from IBM. Of course, given that IBM et al., apparently aren't working on it anymore, any licence revenue they receive, for any operating system, is 100% profit at this point. If you want to buy out a proprietary synthesizer (crowd source the funding for example), I don't think this is a good candidate, and the money would be better contributed to a development effort around a newer synthesizer anyway.
