Re: ubuntu and software synthesiser

[Janina Sajka <janina rednote net>]

Hi, All:

Willie Walker writes:
> Hi Henrik:
> 
> > Is there a way we can make this more user friendly? Are there
> > licensing reasons why gnome-speech is compiled without DECtalk
> > support or technical ones? If it's a question of some compile flags
> > then I can ask our packagers to make a DECtalk-enabled version
> > available.
> 
> The issue is licensing.  The problem is that the DECtalk header files
> are Fonix's intellectual property.  As a result, one needs to have the
> DECtalk SDK installed on their machine to build the DECtalk driver
> (the gnome-speech build will automatically build the DECtalk driver if
> it finds the DECtalk SDK).
> 
> If the Ubuntu distribution folks were able to get the DECtalk SDK on
> their production machines, then I think they'd be able to ship the
> gnome-speech driver for DECtalk and then direct users to the Fonix web
> site to purchase the DECtalk run time (one would need to check the
> DECtalk license to make sure it is OK to ship things built against the
> SDK -- I'm not a lawyer and I'm not qualified to interpret legal
> documents).
We would like to provide you a similar wrapper for the forthcoming
release of TTSynth, http://ttsynth.com, which in turns wraps ibmtts,
formerly and more popularly known as Viavoice. In fact, the
gnome-speech-ibmtts rpm on our web site does exactly that for rpm based
distros. Unfortunately, for TTSynth on Ubuntu there's the problem that
compat-libstdc++-296 (or 2.95) seems no longer available. Since ibmtts
is quite proprietary, even though it's by far the most requested TTS
engine out there, we don't have much control over updating its compile.


-- 

Janina Sajka				Phone: +1.202.595.7777
Partner, Capital Accessibility LLC	http://CapitalAccessibility.Com

Marketing the Owasys 22C talking screenless cell phone in the U.S. and Canada--Go to http://ScreenlessPhone.Com to learn more.

Chair, Accessibility Workgroup		Free Standards Group (FSG)
janina freestandards org		http://a11y.org