I've played a bit with the svox pico voice. It gives a segfault when trying to close it's memory package, probably because I'm on a 64-b bit machine, but it actually creates valid .wav files before crashing. This voice sounds exactly like the voice in Google Navigator on Android phones. This package comes with only a single tool: pico2wave, but it understands a few embedded text commands, for speed and pitch. I found that when you speed it up, it does not scale the pauses, which results in crazy long delays between sentences. I had to modify the source code to make the pauses right, but after that, I was able to compare pico to voxin and espeak at high speed. Voxin (Eloquence) is the clear winner. I'd say Espeak is just a bit better than pico at high speed, but I'm not sure, because I'm more use to the espeak voice. I recorded all three running at a pretty high speed for espeak and pico, but not very fast for Voxin. All are about 1 minute, 54 seconds in length, so it's a fair comparison. You can listen at: http://billrocks.org/espeak.wav http://billrocks.org/pico.wav http://billrocks.org/voxin.wav Now I don't want to bash pico. It's a new engine, and it's some kind of strange hybrid between stitching natural voice segments and formant synthesisers like espeak and voxin. Also, it's open-source, which is awesome! Clearly, it's had little to no tuning for high speed rates. There isn't even a command to override it's insane 1/2 second pauses between sentences. I don't know why this voice has so much static. It sounds like it was recorded with a bad mic. It's really horrible. However, I get a feeling that they are onto something, and if they could just fix a couple things, the pico engine could do high speed like voxin. It already sounds much better at high speed than "natural" voices based on stitching, which relies on frequency shifting. Now, just for fun, here's the same think played with voxin at my "top" reading speed, which I reserve for terribly long-winded authors, because I begin to lose comprehension at this speed. http://billrocks.org/voxin_fast.wav Sina, is it possible for you to upload a wave file for this example? I've attached the text file. I'd love to hear it at your top speed. Thanks, Bill
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