software TTS

[Darragh <lists digitaldarragh com>]

Hello, I'm looking for good software TTS.  I don't mind paying for it at this stage as the apollo sounds horrible in my opinion and when using a laptop its not always practicle to plug it in.  

I'd like something that I can use on a few applications.  At the moment I use/try depending on my mood Gnopernicus, Speakup, Yasr, Emacspeak, BrlTTY, and in a few weeks the SuSE sbl packages.

So far I've tried Flite, F lite, Festivle and of course the apollo but all have sounded terrible or have been very sluggish.  I've been told about a TTS package from ibm called ttsynth that works with gnopernicus and sbl so I'm thinking of buying that but I'd like your input first.  Does it work with some or all of the above packages and is it responsive in the console and in Gnome?  

I've had the IBM viavoice package for years but never got it running.  Today I almost got there however I had problems trying to find libXm.so.1 so I think that's going to be left for another very quiet day.  

Thanks.

Darragh