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

[Luke Yelavich <themuso ubuntu com>]

On Sat, May 16, 2015 at 11:13:18AM AEST, Kyle wrote:
> I don't think DECTalk can run on Linux for much the same reasons as most
> old synthesizers. It's just not being rebuilt against the latest
> libraries. In fact, the version that actually sounded rather good,
> version 4.6, has been abandoned by whoever owns the software now, so if
> it is ever resurrected using old system libraries, it will likely suffer
> the same potential security issues as Voxin et al.

This is actually not quite correct. I have a copy of DECtalk for Linux v5, and 4.6 here, and both work on 
Ubuntu vivid without issue, i.e the say command-line utility works with the DECtalk library. Based on the 
DECtalk library's dependencies, its written purely in C, which makes portability much much easier. 
Ibmtts/Voxin is C++.

I could write a Speech Dispatcher driver for DECtalk, but given its no longer available and demand for using 
it is low, I don't think it would be worth the time.

Luke