Re: speakup using different synths with software speech?

[Willem van der Walt <wvdwalt@csir.co.za>]

Espeak does also have an us english voice.


On Sat, 6 Jun 2009, Tony Baechler wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> Actually, I like sox very much and I use it a lot for basic editing tasks.  I
> also generally prefer the command line.  My first talking computer was an
> Apple II+ with an Echo and a very old version of Textalker, so I can relate to
> poor speech quality.  However, the computer industry has progressed far beyond
> that point, even with hardware speech.  There's really no reason to use very
> low quality speech synthesizers anymore.  Note: I am not saying that ESpeak is
> very low quality.  It is better than the Echo, but I'm not sure how much
> better.  Part of the problem is that I am not in the UK and am not used to
> British voices.  It doesn't mispronounce things too badly and it does have a
> fairly low resource overhead.  With that said, I still don't see any reason
> why I should give up my expensive hardware synthesizers and why I should be
> forced into using non-free software speech.
> 
> Regarding audio editing, I'm not familiar with soundgrab.  I'll look at it.  I
> do like sox, but it isn't good for very precise editing tasks.  The command
> line is great, but when you're dealing with a very small amount of audio, such
> as 0.5 seconds, the command line just doesn't cut it.  I recently put together
> a presentation with music and clips from different audio files.  Sox did a
> great job, but there was a noticable lag between files.  I had to create a
> script with the commands to play each clip and it was obvious to me when one
> ended and the next started.  With something like Sound Forge, it would've been
> one smooth presentation with no gaps and no lag between clips.  I admit that
> I'm not a sox wizard and there are probably workarounds that I don't know
> about, but it took me much longer to get the command parameters exactly right
> since I couldn't easily cut and paste what I wanted.  It worked out well
> enough in the end though.
> 
> Georgina Joyce wrote:
> > Well here my LTLK works well on this debian lenny system with speakup.
> > I've no interest in using it with orca because I quite like espeak.
> > Because my first experience with a talking computere was with HAL and
> > the Apollo 1 synth and espeak is considerably better than that to my
> > ears.  However, I wanted to point out that quite a bit can be done via
> > the console in respect of audio editing.  Perhaps soundgrab and sox
> > doesn't attract you but they're a very powerful combination.  But I
> > accept that I'm happier on the commandline where as others are better
> > with a GUI.  
> >   
> 
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> Speakup@braille.uwo.ca
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> 

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