Re: [g-a-devel]Accessibility talk at linux.conf.au

[Luke Yelavich <themuso themuso com>]

At 11:39 PM 13/01/2004, Malcolm Tredinnick wrote:
> > My question to you (and I didn't want to put you in a spot yesterday) is
> > what's a good TTS system to use? There's DECTalk (USD$50), there's
> > ViaVoice (used to be free; costs money now; Mark the last time I checked
> > used this), and festival (not so good). There's flite/eflite, and how's
> > that?
>
> I have no idea about what is good, bad, or indifferent here. Since I
> only play around with this stuff, I tend to stick to the open source
> alternatives. I find festival to be tolerable if I listen carefully.
> FreeTTS feels a bit easier to use, but having to download and install
> Java is always annoying for me (being a modem user at home) so I have
> not used it as much.
>
> I have zero experience with the commercial offerings, so hopefully
> others will comment with recommendations there.

I have the DECtalk software speech, and it sounds the same as DECtalk 
usually does. However, it is generally laggy, especially with Gnopernicus. 
I don't know whether this has to do with me using it via ALSA, but it is 
not quick off the mark. It tends to be more responsive with longer buffers 
of text.

I also remember someone on this list mentioning cepstral voices. These 
sound really nice, but can't comment on whether they work well with 
Gnopernicus.

hth

Luke