Re: [orca-list] help for voxin

[Michael Whapples <mwhapples aim com>]

Hello Prakash,
As people have stated both ttsynth and voxin both provide the same
voices, because they both use/provide the same synthesiser, IBM
viavoice.

So what are the differences?

Voxin is sold as a complete product. By this I mean when you buy it you
aren't buying viavoice directly, you are buying voxin which is a bundle
of software to provide new voices and associated drivers for a Linux
system, and it happens to be viavoice it uses. The basically means that
it is targeted at specific computer systems (debian and ubuntu) and
provides packages for those systems. If you use one of the targeted
systems, this can make things easy, you just run the voxin installer
script and answer the questions and then things should just work, but if
you don't use one of the targeted systems then things may be more
difficult, although not necessarily impossible. Also whilst viavoice is
part of the voxin bundle, it can be used by other applications.

As a comparison, I think ttsynth is selling you an actual viavoice
single user license. As I understand it ttsynth provides each package
separately (viavoice being the only part you actually pay for), so may
be easier to install on other systems (eg. although the packages are
redhat RPM packages, other distros have tools to convert/use these, such
as slackware which has rpm2tgz, whereas voxin is harder to deal with as
it is a bundle with an installer script).

As for the comment made by someone about voxin getting updated more
frequently, again I think this is due to a difference in design, I don't
think it is updates to the viavoice synthesiser. Voxin would need
updates as new versions of software are used in ubuntu to ensure that
the drivers they provide are compatible, eg. every time ubuntu upgrades
gnome-speech then voxin will need to upgrade voxin to include the new
gnome-speech driver for viavoice. On the other hand, as ttsynth isn't
selling you anything but viavoice, ttsynth doesn't need to be upgraded
when you upgrade gnome-sppeech, you just need to find the new
gnome-speech viavoice driver.

I know some of these differences are quite small, so it may come down to
more which linux distribution you will use. If you are going to use
ubuntu or debian, then you probbly want voxin, if you are going to use
redhat/fedora then you will want to use ttsynth, and if you are going to
use another distribution then the choice is more difficult but ttsynth
might be easier.

Michael Whapples
On Fri, 2008-08-08 at 00:35 +0530, prakash wrote:
> hello friends 
> i am prakash from india 
> i am new for this list 
> and new for linux also 
> i have a dout about good synthisiser for orca 
> i read about i b m tts 
> via voice ,tt-synth and voxin 
> there are great diffrence among the cost of 
> there softwares so please clear my dout which best for personal use
> because i am a student 
> which is the good in performance and in affordable in prize ... 
>  
> thank you