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

["John G. Heim" <jheim@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Gary Lawrence Murphy wrote:

>Yeah, probably a throttle back isn't a bad idea, but the Accent SA
>cost us $60 and it was flushed down the tubes because of false
>promises in the emacspeak docs /and/ the mailing list.  Sure, it's
>only $60, but that's not a trivial amount of money around here.  My
>friend survives on disability and whatever he can make as a gospel
>songwriter.


Have you investigated whether speakup supports that synth? I use both 
emacspeak and speakup. I probably use emacspeak more just because I've 
always used emacspeak. But I have also been very impressed with speakup.

>as for the long pauses before the speech begins, yes, I was surprised
>too.  the Festival synth works by emacspeak passing the whole
>document, or at best a whole paragraph, off to the synth server and
>then waiting for a sound file to be returned. The WAV is then queued
>on the DSP device for playback.  Once playback begins, there is no
>means to abort. The Java synth, mbrola and flite all work the same way
>(using the same code); I don't understand why they'd want to use a
>system like that, and I do question if anyone really seriously does
>use it.


I know flight works fairly well with emacspeak. Although I've never 
installed it, I have used it quite a bit. You're thinking, "How is that 
possible?" I have used flight and oralux quite a bit.  I don't know if 
you're familiar with oralux but it rocks.  It's a live CD (ie bootable). 
I'm not sure about everything it supports but when I get really stuck with 
a piece of hardware, I usually try booting  with oralux into flight and 
emacspeak. I would say that around 80% of the machines I've tried it on 
have come up talking.  I mean, I've trashed the operating system on some 
machine and have been able to repair them via oralux.


When I first started working here at the math department at the U of 
Wisconsin, I couldn't have done my job w/o oralux which depends on 
emacspeak. I had to  build a bunch of dual-bboot machines. I could do a 
network install of Windows but first I had to fdisk the hard drive. 
Otherwise, Windows would slurp up the whole HD and there would be no space 
for linux. I don't know how I'd have done that without oralux.

I guess maybe I could have built aknoppix CD with a tty on ttyS0 or 
something. But by the time I got that done I' might not havehad a job.



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