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

[Christopher Chaltain <chaltain gmail com>]

The only thing I'll toss out there is that I think the original poster 
meant speech quality when he was talking about high quality voices and 
not code quality.

BTW, I don't work for anyone who packages Voxin, but I do try to 
contribute a little bit to Vinux. All I did was provide a link to a wiki 
page where you could read up on Voxin and purchase it for your Vinux 
system, which is what the original poster was running. In fact, I just 
found that link with a simple Google search.

I'm not arguing with the fact that Voxin is built on older libraries or 
has some known issues, but in all of the years I've used Eloquence, the 
only times I've had the synthesizer take my screen reader down due to 
those words you've mentioned is when people have maliciously included 
them in email messages or IRC channels. I agree it's an issue, and it's 
unfortunate it hasn't been addressed, but sometimes I think the issue is 
blown a bit out of proportion. I'm always making trade offs between 
different applications and platforms for various reasons, and I have no 
issue with someone preferring the sound of Eloquence enough to put up 
with these infrequent crashes. Kendall's posts occasionally crash Orca 
on me and I'm running eSpeak, but I'm not considering dropping eSpeak 
because of it.

On 05/15/2015 07:37 PM, Kyle wrote:
> According to B.Henry:
> # 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'm not preaching, I am only attempting to point out the technical
> problems with using something so old and outdated that has to maintain
> more and more very old compatible C libraries on its own in order to
> work at all, and is unable to be rebuilt against the newest libraries
> that all distros are using now. There's also the fact that a simple typo
> or OCR mistake can crash the entire screen reader, and that's no
> exageration. There is also a literary term, which is also the name of a
> Bitcoin client written in Python that will also crash the screen reader
> when speaking it is attempted. I will not write those words here, as
> common though they are, I will certainly be accused of being malicious
> if I write these perfectly normal misspellings here. Believe me, just
> stick an h where the n should be in Wednesday and you will feel the
> burn. Now go Google C a e s u r e or w e b h e s d a y. One is a
> literary term that is also a Bitcoin application, and the other is a
> common OCR mistake found especially in old newspaper headlines. The
> first one I mentioned is a one-letter typo, where the letter typed is
> very close to the correct letter, so is extremely easy to mistype. Now
> tell me again that I'm preaching. I can't recommend something that is
> broken, and will refuse to help someone get it going, knowing that they
> will have trouble with it. Sorry Christopher, I know you'll wax
> defensive over these statements, though they are indeed true. Do you
> work with/for the person who continues to package this mess? If so, then
> I'm sorry for you indeed, but there's still no need to be defensive of
> something so defective.
>
> <snip>
>
> # Also voxin works on several distros, and very popular ones out of the
> # box, e.g. Arch, Manjaro, Debian...
>
> Sure it works, for now, because the packager has put in more and more
> old system libraries in an attempt to keep it working. There is no
> rebuilding of the code, which is either lost or obfuscated beyond
> usability even by the packagers and license resellers. The old system
> libraries that have to be used to make it work can actually pose
> security problems as well.
>
> <snip>
>
> # 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.
>
> There are already many attempts at various voices for Espeak, because
> making them is easy. It's now only a matter of packaging them to work
> with speech-dispatcher until such time as it supports proper voice
> variants, which is hopefully on the horizon to be implemented sooner
> rather than later.
>
> # 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.
>
> See above for the reasons why this synthesizer is of extremely poor
> quality, and this is not just a personal opinion, it's a technical fact.
> I point you once again to Googling certain words that are known among
> the community of users as "crash words." Very few other voices have such
> "crash words," and if they did, they would have either been fixed or
> taken off the market years ago instead of being held together by the
> increasing layers of compatibility glue just to keep them working just a
> little bit longer. Imagine if you purchased a TV with problems like
> this. Say for example you turned on your TV and found that whenever a
> certain shape appeared on screen, the whole thing would crash, forcing
> you to turn it off and then back on. More common would be a malformed
> packet caused by degradation of the digital signal, but you get the
> idea. If such a packet forced you to powercycle your TV, you would say
> that it's broken or low-quality, and you would rightfully want your
> money back. This is the case with Voxin, ViaVoice, Eloquence, IBMTTS,
> TTSynth, and on and on and on, but it's just not getting fixed.
> Therefore, the quality is very much measurable, and is very very bad,
> and if I purchase any one of these, even knowing how broken it is, in
> many places, I should have the right to a refund, or even a lawsuit
> against the vendor for selling, and continuing to sell,  known defective
> software.
>
> # 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.
>
> This is not one of those e-mails. It is a technical summary of why
> people should try to find, or maybe even make, something that works
> better, even if it sounds relatively similar.
>
> # 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.
>
> Sure there's no trouble installing it, because someone is putting a lot
> of effort into making it installable. Apparently, no one is putting so
> much effort into making Festival so easy to install and use, which is
> sad indeed. Voxin et al certainly aren't usable in the long term, and I
> stand by this technical acessment.
> Sent from my sun spot

--
Christopher (CJ)
chaltain at Gmail