From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: X-Greylist: delayed 558 seconds by postgrey-1.34 at befuddled; Thu, 09 May 2013 19:15:11 EDT Received: from tds-solutions.net (tds-solutions.net [69.164.206.65]) by befuddled.reisers.ca (Postfix) with ESMTP id C9FC51EF6D5 for ; Thu, 9 May 2013 19:15:11 -0400 (EDT) Received: from [65.126.168.132] (unknown [65.126.168.132]) (Authenticated sender: tyler) by tds-solutions.net (Postfix) with ESMTPSA id 79A4BA08C for ; Thu, 9 May 2013 17:05:58 -0600 (MDT) Message-ID: <518C2BCC.3010003@tysdomain.com> Date: Thu, 09 May 2013 17:05:48 -0600 From: "Littlefield, Tyler" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:17.0) Gecko/20130328 Thunderbird/17.0.5 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: "Speakup is a screen review system for Linux." Subject: Re: Voxin was: Re: Switching to Linux References: <8021.1367479350@ccs.covici.com> <518A5508.8020502@gmail.com> <518A6931.6070806@math.wisc.edu> <25752.1368029641@ccs.covici.com> <518A9206.8090008@math.wisc.edu> <518B4FCB.6090003@baechler.net> <518BAC38.8060708@math.wisc.edu> <20130509193744.GJ2324@bmcginty.hopto.org> <518C29C9.90704@gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <518C29C9.90704@gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-BeenThere: speakup@linux-speakup.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.15 Precedence: list Reply-To: "Speakup is a screen review system for Linux." List-Id: "Speakup is a screen review system for Linux." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 09 May 2013 23:15:12 -0000 >but I guess that's no different from what Microsoft has been >doing for years yeah... totally. Now if you had any clue what you were talking about short of the usual windows bashing on a Linux list, we might actually be able to take you seriously. Also I honestly see nothing wrong with voxen/eloquence. Sure it is outdated and has problems, but I prefer it to the harsh headcold sound of ESpeak. It's a matter of preference that doesn't exactly set voxen or espeak above one or the other. On 5/9/2013 4:57 PM, Kyle wrote: > According to Brandon McGinty-Carroll: > # As I recall, voxen requires /dev/dsp or somesuch ancient sound API. > > As far as I know, this is correct, but it's a lot worse than that. Not > only does Voxin require an ancient sound API, but it also requires > ancient C libraries in order to function. The source code is either lost > or is otherwise unavailable even to those who would maintain it, so it > can't even be rebuilt against the latest C libraries or even get any of > its numerous bugs fixed. It still crashes on words like c a e s u r e, > which according to Google is a bitcoin client written in Python, and is > also a rather common username on some non-blindness related forums. It > also crashes on a rather common OCR error when recognizing the word > Wednesday. I googled that one as well, and turns out it is a very common > OCR scanning error, especially when scanning newspapers. I was > especially seeing it in scanned newspaper archives from the late 1800's > and early 1900's. There are also reports of random crashes that cause > Voxin and other speech synthesis engines with the exact same codebase > but different names to randomly kill the screen reader, and there is > nothing anyone can do about it, because the source code is not available > or is lost. Worse still is the fact that many companies are actually > making a profit from licensing something so outdated, broken and > unstable, but I guess that's no different from what Microsoft has been > doing for years . It may fall on deaf ears for some reason, but > my recommendation is to avoid Voxin and all the other voices like it. > Use eSpeak, because it ships with most distros and just works. If you > don't like the way eSpeak sounds, you can still get festival working, > and Festival is capable of running some amazing free voices. There's > also Pico, which is now supported natively in speech-dispatcher. All > these voices sound better and work better than Voxin, which literally > makes my head hurt. > ~Kyle > http://kyle.tk/ -- Take care, Ty http://tds-solutions.net He that will not reason is a bigot; he that cannot reason is a fool; he that dares not reason is a slave. Sent from my Toaster (tm).