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

I use Voxin. I don't have any problems with it and installing it is just
a matter of downloading one archive file and running one script, at
least on Ubuntu. I also prefer open software and applications, but I am
pretty pragmatic, and I'll use whatever tools are at hand. Although I
use Voxin, I don't rely on it. I have access to eSpeak, and I do use
eSpeak quite a bit as well, so if I did ever have a problem with Voxin,
I'm sure I could switch over to eSpeak without too much trouble.

On 10/03/13 01:58, Steve Holmes wrote:

I generally prefer also to use free as in freedom software as much as I can while on my Linux systems.  And 
I do use some proprietary stuff like on my Mac. However, when it comes to closed proprietary software that 
is so old and out of date and unsupported by any developers, you are left vulnerable.  It amazes me that 
people can get this old IBMTTS / Voxin or whatever to work on modern systems at all anymore.

Opinions do vary on this subject but I think having to rely on very outdated low-level libraries to run 
software is a really bad idea.  I for one will never install this software for these reasons.

On Jan 8, 2013, at 12:34 PM, "D.J.J. Ring, Jr." <n1ea arrl net> wrote:


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

On Jan 7, 2013 9:20 PM, "Alex Midence" <alex midence gmail com> wrote:
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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_______________________________________________
orca-list mailing list
orca-list gnome org
https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list
Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca.
The manual is at http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-access-guide/nightly/ats-2.html
The FAQ is at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions
Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org
Find out how to help at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/HowCanIHelp
_______________________________________________
orca-list mailing list
orca-list gnome org
https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list
Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca.
The manual is at http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-access-guide/nightly/ats-2.html
The FAQ is at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions
Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org
Find out how to help at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/HowCanIHelp


_______________________________________________
orca-list mailing list
orca-list gnome org
https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list
Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca.
The manual is at http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-access-guide/nightly/ats-2.html
The FAQ is at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions
Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org
Find out how to help at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/HowCanIHelp



-- 
Christopher (CJ)
chaltain at Gmail
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