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

[Michael Whapples <mwhapples aim com>]

Hello,
Any of the commercial synths you will be restricted to what
architectures they have binaries for. I think Viavoice on Linux is only
i386 (so I think applies to both voxin and ttsynth). I think dectalk is
available for x86-64 platforms. I don't know about cesptral.

The open source synths are more likely to work on the various platforms
as you can have a go at compiling it should no suitable binary exist.

Michael Whapples
On Fri, 2008-06-20 at 12:30 -0500, alonzo wrote:
> Hello Michael,
>
> I've jsut looked up voxin. It seems to be promising, but does not work
> with speech dispatcher for ubuntu hardy unless it's proviced in the
> reposityry. It's also only made for 386 modes not x86-64. So i am
> wondering if it will work on my system.
> Alonzo
>
> On Fri, 2008-06-20 at 13:33 +0100, Michael Whapples wrote:
> > 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