Re: [orca-list] got voxin working, not need some help geting pico up and running

[Jason White <jason jasonjgw net>]

Krishnakant Mane <krmane gmail com> wrote:
> Is pico, a synth?

Yes.
> How is the quality?

When it was released, its developers claimed it provided the best quality
speech for its small size.

I think they could make a reasonable case for that claim. It uses hidden
Markov models, so it isn't a formant synthesizer or a diphone/concatenation
synthesizer. Unfortunately the code needed to rebuild the language files and
the voices wasn't released in source form. Someone could probably write open
equivalents if they so wanted, but that wouldn't make it possible to support
additional languages or voices because it wouldn't include the machine
learning algorithms involved, which as far as I know are very proprietary.

For English, I think the British voice is of better quality than the American
English one.