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

[Jason White <jason jasonjgw net>]

Kyle <kyle4jesus gmail com> 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? 

It seems to have a community following. Some people evidently like it, which
is fine. I must confess that I'm not one of those people.
> 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.

Svox Pico is another option, reputed to be supported by the latest version of
SpeechDispatcher.

A further possibility, not yet supported, is Mary TTS, which is under active
development and also happens to be free, open-source software.