via voice vs. flite... annoyance and advice

[Tim Cross <tcross@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I don't know about flite. I did try out an early version of flite and
didn't really like the quality of the voices and missed not having
multiple voices. The ViaVoice TTS provides easily understandable
voices, especially at high speech rates and nice support of voice
locking. For me, these were two very important features - I find the
voice locking very useful, especially when programming - its even
helped me find bugs on occasion (well, syntax errors mainly). 

I guess it all depends on what your needs are, what you value and what
you feel that is worth. If $40 is a lot for you and your happy with
flite, then maybe there is no real value in it for you. For me, the
cost wasn't really an issue - in fact, I got the full SDK as my
employer wants me to use it for a proof of concept for a small project
they are working on and so they paid for it all. However, I was quite
willing to pay the $40USD for a license, which is trivial compared to
what you have to pay for speech support on any other platform. 

With respect to your flite issues - how are you moving across the
text/links when you get this fast speech? If you are using the arrow
keys, I would recommend getting use to useing the emacs movement keys
bound to things like C-f, M-f, C-n and the 'block' movements tied to
moving by sentence/sexp or paragraph etc. In many cases, this will
reduce the text being sent to the TTS and gives cleaner output. I also
find that once you get use to these main keyborad movement keys, its
much faster than lifting your hand off the keyborad to go to the
cursor keys. Again, your milage may differ.

HTH

Tim 


Robert D. Crawford writes:
 > After recently hearing about the availability of via voice under linux
 > again, I thought I would ask about it.  I know T.V. and Tim use it, but
 > how many others?  What are the advantages?  I have not had any problems
 > with flite, other than the annoying thing it does sometimes.  When I
 > scroll over text quickly, especially urls, it has a tendency to make the
 > speech really fast and high pitched... almost like it is trying to get
 > it out before it starts reading the next line.  No crashes, no locking
 > emacs, nothing but the one annoyance.
 > 
 > I guess my basic question is this: is it worth it for me to spend $40 to
 > get it.  In my present situation, this is a fair amount of money.  I
 > won't have to go without food, but it is a kinda unnecessary
 > expenditure. 
 > 
 > Another issue I would consider would be whether or not this software
 > would be useful for a long time.  I mean, will I be stuck using an old
 > kernel, or not being able to upgrade other things to continue to use it.
 > 
 > I keep thinking of other issues... will it suck my system resources?  I
 > am using a vaio laptop with a PIII 1 gHz and 256 M ram.
 > 
 > If anyone has advice on the flite issue, please let me know.
 > 
 > Thanks for your time,
 > 
 > rdc
 > -- 
 > --------------------------------------------------------------------------
 > Robert D. Crawford                                      rdc1x@xxxxxxxxxxx
 > 
 > To be or not to be.
 > 		-- Shakespeare
 > To do is to be.
 > 		-- Nietzsche
 > To be is to do.
 > 		-- Sartre
 > Do be do be do.
 > 		-- Sinatra
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