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

[Christopher Chaltain <chaltain gmail com>]

Since you're using Vinux, if you're interested in Eloquence, then you 
might want to get the Voxin speech synthesizer from Vinux. You can read 
more on the Vinux wiki at http://wiki.vinuxproject.org/voxin

On 05/15/2015 04:40 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 I will warn you they are quite old, no longer being updated, and while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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--
Christopher (CJ)
chaltain at Gmail