Re: [orca-list] New Linux user, needing higher quality speech...

[covici ccs covici com]

However, I don't think there is a speech dispatcher driver for the
sepstral voices, so without paying a big fee, you need to buy version 5
only, if that is still available.  Otherwise you cannot save the voice
output to a .wav file.

Josh K <joshknnd1982 gmail com> wrote:

> yes cepstral voices are still sold for linux.
>
> follow me on twitter @joshknnd1982
>
> On 5/15/2015 5:40 AM, Thomas Ward wrote:
> > Hello Daniel,
> >
> > Unfortunately, high quality voices for Linux are somewhat problematic
> > at the moment. There is nothing up to the quality of the Vocalizer
> > Voices that I am aware of.
> >
> > If you are a fan of the Eloquence voices they are available from
> > Oralux for like $6.99 per language which isn't a bad price. Although,
> > I will warn you they are quite old, no longer being updated, and while
> > they do work are prone to problems. However, personally speaking I
> > think it is the best commercial solution available for a VI Linux user
> > at this time.
> >
> > Festival will work but takes a bit of fiddling and configuring to get
> > working with Orca. Besides being somewhat complicated to install and
> > configure I honestly don't think the speech quality will be that much
> > better than Espeak.  Some of the voices do sound a little more human,
> > but they are still not as good as the voices available for other
> > platforms like Mac OS, iOS,  and Windows.
> >
> >
> > There are the Cepstral voices which sound okay, probably the best
> > sounding voices for Linux, but I do not believe are being sold any
> > more. Even so while I own a couple of them for reading etc I find they
> > tend to lag a bit and sometimes crash more often than not. So wouldn't
> > rely on them as a primary TTS solution.
> >
> > What I am saying is while Espeak may not  be desirable the reason most
> > VI Linux users use it is because it is fast, stable, and responsive.
> > There aren't a lot of choices here. To be honest if you are having
> > hearing problems using speech your best bet would be to use a braille
> > display. I really do not see a lot of better choices than Espeak if
> > you are having troubles with robotic sounding voices since the
> > majority of engines and voices for Linux are pretty robotic when
> > compared to the higher quality voices for other platforms. I myself am
> > pretty hard of hearing and I'm finding a braille display increasingly
> > better than speech.
> >
> > Cheers!
> > _______________________________________________
> > orca-list mailing list
> > orca-list gnome org
> > https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list
> > Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca.
> > The manual is at http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-access-guide/nightly/ats-2.html
> > The FAQ is at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions
> > Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org
> > Find out how to help at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/HowCanIHelp
>
> _______________________________________________
> orca-list mailing list
> orca-list gnome org
> https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list
> Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca.
> The manual is at http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-access-guide/nightly/ats-2.html
> The FAQ is at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions
> Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org
> Find out how to help at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/HowCanIHelp

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         John Covici
         covici ccs covici com