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

[Luke Yelavich <themuso ubuntu com>]

On Mon, May 18, 2015 at 09:16:18AM AEST, Thomas Ward wrote:
> Hi Luke,
>
> That's just it though. I have not been able to get the Dectalk's say
> program working on modern versions of Ubuntu past 10.04 or so. I
> haven't honestly put a lot of time tracking down why it isn't working,
> but I have tried to get it to work with no luck. In the end I just
> chose to forgo any hassle and go with Espeak which just works out of
> the box.

Bare in mind that the DECtalk software is i386 only, so you would need to make sure you have i386 standard 
libs on your system. Arch, Fedora, and Debian/Ubuntu have this implemented in various ways, and its not too 
hard to set up. On Debian/Ubuntu, installing libc6:i386 on a 64-bit system should get you waht you need. Once 
DECtalk is installed, run sudo ldconfig to refresh the ld.so cache as the libraries for DECtalk are in 
/usr/local/lib.

Secondly, the DECtalk software by default tries to use /dev/dsp, which is the OSS audio output, so it would 
only work via writing to a wav file, or retrieving the audio directly via the API for further procdessing.

Luke