Re: [orca-list] New Linux user, needing higher quality speech...

[Thomas Ward <thomasward1978 gmail com>]

Hello Daniel,

Unfortunately, high quality voices for Linux are somewhat problematic
at the moment. There is nothing up to the quality of the Vocalizer
Voices that I am aware of.

If you are a fan of the Eloquence voices they are available from
Oralux for like $6.99 per language which isn't a bad price. Although,
I will warn you they are quite old, no longer being updated, and while
they do work are prone to problems. However, personally speaking I
think it is the best commercial solution available for a VI Linux user
at this time.

Festival will work but takes a bit of fiddling and configuring to get
working with Orca. Besides being somewhat complicated to install and
configure I honestly don't think the speech quality will be that much
better than Espeak.  Some of the voices do sound a little more human,
but they are still not as good as the voices available for other
platforms like Mac OS, iOS,  and Windows.


There are the Cepstral voices which sound okay, probably the best
sounding voices for Linux, but I do not believe are being sold any
more. Even so while I own a couple of them for reading etc I find they
tend to lag a bit and sometimes crash more often than not. So wouldn't
rely on them as a primary TTS solution.

What I am saying is while Espeak may not  be desirable the reason most
VI Linux users use it is because it is fast, stable, and responsive.
There aren't a lot of choices here. To be honest if you are having
hearing problems using speech your best bet would be to use a braille
display. I really do not see a lot of better choices than Espeak if
you are having troubles with robotic sounding voices since the
majority of engines and voices for Linux are pretty robotic when
compared to the higher quality voices for other platforms. I myself am
pretty hard of hearing and I'm finding a braille display increasingly
better than speech.

Cheers!