Re: [orca-list] ORCA improvements

[Luke Yelavich <themuso ubuntu com>]

On Sun, May 09, 2010 at 05:03:18PM CEST, Bill Cox wrote:
> I'll look at the problem on 64-bit Ubuntu Lucid.  However, over the
> next several months I would love to help out in an effort to make
> various voices easier to select, install and use.  We've got a guy
> working on OpenSAPI to make Microsoft voices available.  I'd love to
> have a single accessible application where users could select any of
> the free voices, or even buy the non-free voices.  One problem is that
> non-free voices all have custom ways to buy and install, and it
> depends on your flavor of OS.  Could we work with Gilles, Cepstral,
> and the others to have a clearing-house application which talks to
> their web sites and helps out with buying, installing, and maintaining
> voices?  We could even allow users to preview voices to help determine
> which ones they actually would like to buy.  This sort of app is
> exactly what's missing in open-source land for the blind.

While I haven't thought of how we could standardise on buying these proprietary speech synthesizers, I have 
certainly been thinking about how we can make it easier for users to install and use the speech synthesizer 
they have bought. I have already given the design of this feature much thought, and it will require the 
participation of all proprietary speech synthesizer vendors, as well as one or two open source projects like 
OpenTTS/speech-dispatcher.

I have yet to completely document my thoughts and publish them, but I hope to do that very shortly. If tnere 
is enough demand, I can see about writing them up and publishing them sooner.

Luke