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

[Kyle <kyle4jesus gmail com>]

There is definitely a better voice, and it's free. There are several 
ways to make Pico run with speech-dispatcher, and that voice actually 
sounds better than eSpeak, if you feel that eSpeak gives you a headache. 
There is a generic configuration file already available for Pico in 
speech-dispatcher, and a modified version using my very own PicoSpeaker 
interface is also available. My Pico build on Arch Linux is currently 
broken, but as soon as I can rebuild it, I will do so. For other 
distros, Pico is likely already included, and definitely sounds better 
than Voxin, without all the bugs and other risks.

Additionally, the Google voices that come with Android 4.0 are free 
software, licensed by the Nagoya Institute of Technology under a 
BSD-style license, and sound very good, even better than Pico. Sadly I 
haven't yet found the source code with a working build system that can 
make it build correctly, and at the moment lack the skills necessary to 
put together the correct build scripts. These voices should be available 
from the Android 4.0 git tree, and should be relatively trivial to port 
to desktop Linux. In fact, I would go out on a limb and say that they 
are probably easier to port to desktop Linux than Voxin is to setup, and 
again, none of the risks associated with running very badly outdated 
core libraries would be present if running these voices. I am still 
looking for a direct link to the Google TTS voices from Android 4.0, or 
better yet, the NiTech source code itself before the Google branding, 
and if I can find it, I'll post it here.
~Kyle
http://kyle.tk/
--
"Kyle? ... She calls her cake, Kyle?"
Out of This World, season 2 episode 21 - "The Amazing Evie"