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

[Luke Yelavich <themuso ubuntu com>]

On Sat, May 16, 2015 at 09:43:05AM AEST, Jason White wrote:
> 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.

It should be noted that the pico library that Speech Dispatcher uses does not make advanced functionality 
like index marks available, so whilst it works well with Speech DIspatcher, don't expect to get good 
performance and support if you want to use advanced reading functionality.

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

Mary TTS is java based, which means that Speech Dispatcher would likely have to work with it in a 
client-server model, similar to how Festival is used today.

Luke