Re: Software Speech (Re: ibm tts run-time engine purchasing alternatives)

[Jason White <jasonw@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Along similar lines, I've managed to set up software DECTALK 4.61 with 32-bit
versions of tcl and all necessary libraries to run on my AMD64 laptop. It
isn't very reliable, however, and crashes quite unpredictably. Until I upgraded
the kernel to use udev, one symptom of the problems was that the permissions
on /dev/audio would somehow be changed to exclude write access whenever a
crash happened, so I'de have to become root and fix it before restarting the
speech server.

After the kernel upgrade, the system now uses udev rather than devfs for
device management and consequently, for some reason, the permission problem is
gone, though unfortunately not the crashes themselves.

On campus I now have access to a braille display, thus the speech problems are
more of an annoyance than a major obstacle: I just bring in my laptop, connect
the braille display and get work done. I'll probably try ViaVoice when it
becomes available, especially if they have a native x86_64 version.

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