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

[Josh K <joshknnd1982 gmail com>]

yes cepstral voices are still sold for linux.

follow me on twitter @joshknnd1982

On 5/15/2015 5:40 AM, Thomas Ward wrote:
> 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 I will warn you they are quite old, no longer being updated, and while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!
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