I agree with Alex. I will pay gladly for something if it does the job I need done.
Voxin does a job and very nicely.
For $100.00 I'd want automatic installation and bug fixing releases, and I would be happy to pay that.
David
Ok, that didn't come out right. I was using iPhone dictation software
and it messed up on what I meant to say. some clarification:
If you choose not to use voxin, do it for other reasons than citing
any potential unreliability. Yes, there are bugs but they are not
noticeable. There are no spontaneous crashes, garbled speech, lags,
delays or anything else like that. It is clear and responsive and
utterly reliable. I use it litterally every day for hours and hours
as my primary speech synth at work. I prefer it to mroe
human-sounding voices like the ones from cepstral or Nuance. I
certainly find it infinitely preferable to Festival. IBM did a truly
fantastic job with it. Now, in Linux, Espeak is available right out
of the box on all the distributions I have tried and it is also clear,
responsive and utterly reliable. Mr. duddington did a truly wonderful
job on his speech synthesizer. Add libsonic and it is a real, honest
to goodness speed demon. I use it on Linux exclusively because Voxin
as Eloquence is known there seems more problematic to install on it
and I am happy with what is already in place. When I evaluate any
assistive technology my overarching concern is:
Does it work?
Next to that is:
How easy is it to set up?
then, there's cost:
Can I afford it?
This makes me a bit of a maverick among Linux enthusiasts but, I quite
frankly don't give one single solitary darn about whether or not it's
proprietary. I am not a programmer. I am an end user. If I have to
pay for it with money or time and community participation, it's all
the same to me. Most important is usability, reliability, setup, and
affordability.
Thanks.
alex M
On 1/7/13, Alex Midence <alex midence gmail com> wrote:
> Ridiculous. I use it every day in a production environment and find it
> absolutely reliable. Furthermore I use it in windows which is notoriously
> insecure system. It works great. If you're not going to use it do not use
> its old nature orator call it unreliable because it is not true
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> On Jan 7, 2013, at 5:47 PM, Kyle <kyle4jesus gmail com> wrote:
>
>> 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"
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