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

["B.Henry" <burt1iband gmail com>]

Kyle, I understand your point of view, but this kind of post is really 
once again preaching in my opinion. Those who can and wish to go FOS or 
bust are already doing so, and those who can't or won't switch away from 
Voxin will not be convinced.
I personally prefer espeak by a lot for English, but people with hearing 
loss issues find many synths unusable.
Also voxin works on several distros, and very popular ones out of the 
box, e.g. Arch, Manjaro, Debian...
My limited experience with mbrola did not impress me so far, and 
festival has been problematic for even some fairly experienced folks to 
get working.
If it is important to someone to try and get people using something 
other than eloquence, aka Voxin, aka viavoice... then I think making 
good new voices for existing synths such as espeak will be helpful. I've 
made a few, but I am not sure whether or not  they will help many people 
who have a hard time hearing existing espeak voices.
The bottom line is that quality is a subjective term, and although 
certain aspects of quality can be objectively measured at the end of the 
day we are talking about personal prefference. Saying that eloquence is 
not high quality is at best a personal opinion. Again this comes from 
someone who uses ESpeak.
I've seen mailing lists degenerate in to spaces doninated by "my voice 
is better than yours" conversations for days on end where the clutter of 
voice prefference posts makes it annoying to look for the other content 
being posted.
I've sure seen more email from people who can't get festival to work 
than those who have had trouble installing Voxin, and Voxin certainly is 
easy to install on the distro the original poster is usiing.


     B.H.
   Registerd Linux User 521886

On 15/05/15 07:54 AM, Kyle wrote:
> The original poster was asking about high quality voices, and mentioned
> being new to modern Linux in general. Why then do people continue to
> recommend something like Voxin or whatever they're calling it these
> days, which is by no means a high quality voice, and is not only hard to
> understand, but also hard to get installed into most distros? He said
> he's having trouble hearing robotic and unclear voices, therefore, he
> will need to either get tips on how to make Festival work or use the
> Mbrola configuration for Espeak. Some of the Festival voices do actually
> sound quite good, although nothing feels as responsive as Espeak here.
> Much of the robotics of Espeak can be fixed by making variant voices,
> although they have to be made as separate voices, as variant files don't
> currently work with speech-dispatcher. As for festival, it should be
> possible to load in the voices you want and enable a startup service
> that runs
> festival --server
> I need to try that here, but I have heard recent reports that this does
> indeed work. Best Festival voices include bdl and slt. I think these are
> available in Arch using the festival-us package, but other distros have
> different names for this package.
> Sent from my title page