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technical problems with using something so old and outdated that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
