Re: [orca-list] recommended text to speech engine other the ne-speak

[Michael Whapples <mwhapples aim com>]

Hello,
Here are some suggestions for you. You should also note that you may
hear of voxin, this provides IBMtts (viavoice) which is the same as
ttsynth gives you, along with some extra packages to intergrate it with
applications (eg. the gnome-speech driver, speech-dispatcher driver,
etc).

Dectalk software synthesiser from phonix (non-free)
Cepstral swift (non-free)
Freetts (free as the name suggests, based of flite, written in java)
flite (free, based on festival, flite is meant to be a lighter weight
version of festival but I still say heavy on system resource)
festival (free, quite heavy on system resources, has more voices than
flite, many don't like its sound)
mbrolla (not really tts as it only produces the output from phonemes)
Cicero (free, they say french and something which ressembles english,
uses mbrola to produce the audio output from the phonemes)
epos (free, claims to be language independent (configuration file
defines language stuff rather than the code), czech and slovak voices
provided)

I have only tried freetts, flite and festival on Linux, I have heard
dectalk on windows and didn't like the sound, the rest I can't really
comment too much on.

Hope this is of use. Sorry for no URL's google will help as usual.

Michael Whapples
On Fri, 2008-06-20 at 02:18 -0500, alonzo wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>
> I am looking for an alternative engine other then e-speak. It does not
> have to  be free. I'm still waiting on my reply from capital
> accessibility concerning my purchase and the file i've lost. I've not
> recieved a word though. So if anyone has some experiences using other
> speech engines with Orca, please share them with me. I've decided to
> stick with Ubuntu for now.
>
> Alonzo