Re: [orca-list] How many people us voxin?

[Kyle <kyle4jesus gmail com>]

I don't use Voxin or any of its other various incarnations. One reason, 
although not at all the main reason, is that it's proprietary, meaning 
that there can be absolutely no community participation in its 
development. I also don't use it here because I can't stand the way it 
sounds; it literally makes my head hurt. However, the main reason I 
don't use it and can't recommend it for daily use, and possibly the main 
reason you are having problems with it, is the fact that many different 
companies own licenses to cell it, and to call it what they like, but no 
one appears to have the source code, which hasn't even been rebuilt in 
more than 10 years. This means that no one has the ability to fix any 
bugs, no matter how much they may want to fix them. It also means that 
the binary code, which was last built probably 12 years ago, depends on 
horribly outdated versions of C libraries and other core system-level 
code, which are bundled with Voxin, IBMTTS, TTSynth and other various 
renamings of the same software for compatibility, but run poorly on 
today's hardware, and even have the potential to reintroduce 
vulnerabilities and/or security exploits into your system that were 
fixed long ago, but may not yet have been fixed in the compatibility 
libraries that are being installed just to make Voxin and its relatives 
speak. In short, if you just want a toy Linux box to play around with, 
Voxin or something similar may be OK, but avoid this abandonware like 
the plague if you want to use it in a production or mission-critical 
environment.

As for eSpeak, I use it every day here on my main box, and it's the 
primary speech synthesizer in most distributions, completely supplanting 
Festival and/or Flite over 5 years ago. It is free, open source software 
under the terms of the GPL license, so community participation is 
possible and encouraged. The source code is freely available, so when 
bugs crawl out, they can be squashed by anyone who knows how to squash 
them. Because the source code is available, it is possible to keep 
eSpeak updated and built against the current libraries and system-level 
code, so that no old vulnerabilities, security exploits or crashes will 
be introduced in order to get an old compiled binary working. 
Furthermore, over the years, eSpeak has become one of the best free (as 
in freedom) speech synthesizers available, which is capable of running 
quite responsively on more hardware than almost all other speech 
synthesizers, both free and proprietary. Hope this helps.
~Kyle
http://kyle.tk/
--
"Kyle? ... She calls her cake, Kyle?"
Out of This World, season 2 episode 21 - "The Amazing Evie"