IBMTTS on slackware

[Michael Whapples <mwhapples@aim.com>]

Hello,
I know this has come up before, but I can't remember any actual final
conclusion.

Whilst I thought espeak was fast enough, I found I had to use a windows
machine last week, and it reminded me how I do actually use eloquence in
windows faster than I have espeak. This has got me thinking whether I
should get IBMTTS for linux, but I have a few questions.

I know that IBMTTS requires an old compatibility library, which I am
unsure is provided in slackware. So how could I go about trying to get
this library? Does anyone know of a suitable slackware package for it?
If not how might I go about providing this myself from source (I had a
look around for the source code I might need, but all libstdc++ seems to
have numbers such as 6.0.x etc much highrt than what the TTSynth site
suggests, 2.9.6 or 2.9.5). Could it be possible to use a package from a
different distribution, eg. I remember back in the days when I used
trplayer, I could use rpm2tgz to convert the realplayer 8 package into a
slackware package and it worked fine, but I suspect that for libstdc++
compatibility libraries things may not be so simple.

This brings me on to another question, whether to use voxin or ttsynth?
The ttsynth website says there won't be any support provided, so I guess
this means if I buy ttsynth and can't get it working then I am on my own
and may have wasted money on it. Might things be better with voxin,
their website says that voxin includes the libstdc++ compatibility
library (I guess for debian or ubuntu as those are the distros
mentioned). 

Alternatively I am wondering whether it would be best save the money and
stick with espeak as it is good and works, where as ibmtts sounds like I
may hit all sorts of compatibility issues and potentially have no
support from the seller.

Michael Whapples