[orca-list] espeak-extra-voices

[Kyle <kyle4jesus gmail com>]

In an earlier thread regarding making eSpeak voice variants available to
Orca, it was determined that new voices can be made rather easily, and
that speech-dispatcher would expose these voices to Orca once both
speech-dispatcher and Orca have been restarted. Because the resulting
voice files are plain text files and would take up very little space on
the end user's system, I would like to propose a central repository
where individual voices can be downloaded and copied into eSpeak's voice
directory. I would also like to propose a tarball including all the
voices that people want to make available in a package called something
like espeak-extra-voices. This archive could then be packaged for
distros by anyone interested in making them easily installable from each
distro's official repositories or PPA's or user repositories. Given
enough interest, I will put together a website soon that will have a few
voices I've cobbled together and any others that people send me that
I've been able to test. I also have a couple of other voice variants
that I have received over the years that I have been able to modify to
work with Orca and speech-dispatcher that I will also include on the
website and in the archive. I also propose to make samples available so
that someone who would like to download a voice file will know what that
voice sounds like before it is downloaded and copied into the eSpeak
voice directory.

Just a couple of things before I get started with this. First, does this
seem like a good idea? Is it something that I could get distros to
package,i.e. is there enough demand for something like this? From past
threads, it would seem so, but I just want to know that I'm not wasting
effort, even on what would seem to be a rather small project. My other
question involves licensing. Because eSpeak itself is GPLv3, I would
assume that voice files are also covered under GPLV3, but I could be
wrong. I guess the question would be is it the right thing to do to use
GPLv3 for my archive for consistency, or should a different license be
used for voice files that are not distributed as part of eSpeak?
~Kyle
http://kyle.tk/
-- 
"Kyle? ... She calls her cake, Kyle?"
Out of This World, season 2 episode 21 - "The Amazing Evie"