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

[Christopher Chaltain <chaltain gmail com>]

Sorry, if you're directing this question at me, I've never used 
Festival. I've just used Voxin and eSpeak on Linux, and I use eSpeak 
right now almost exclusively.

On 05/15/2015 08:34 AM, kk wrote:
> HI Christopher,
> I remember I had tryed some thing similar in the past but can't quite
> recall the setup sequence.
> Festival has to be made as a startup service based daemon and also some
> module for festival-speechdispatcher has to be setup.
> I can't remember exactly, so if you have any idea please mail back the
> instructions.
> Happy hacking.
> Krishnakant.
> On Friday 15 May 2015 05:47 PM, Christopher Chaltain wrote:
> > 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 I will warn you they are quite old, no longer being updated, and while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!
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > orca-list mailing list
> > > orca-list gnome org
> > > https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list
> > > Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca.
> > > The manual is at
> > > http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-access-guide/nightly/ats-2.html
> > > The FAQ is at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions
> > > Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org
> > > Find out how to help at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/HowCanIHelp

--
Christopher (CJ)
chaltain at Gmail