[Kde-accessibility] Nice KTTS, but without TTS.

[Olaf Jan Schmidt]

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Hi!

[Robert Vogl, Freitag, 6. August 2004 16:46]
> Both are NOT part of SuSE Linux, one of the most popular distributions.
>

Festival is part of SuSE Linux Professionel 9.1. MBROLA cannot be included 
in distributions, as it is abandoned, closed-source, and only for 
non-commercial use.

I am happy that most distributions now include festival, wish gives us 
speech synthesis for English, Spanish and Welsh. There are also patches 
available to make Festival speak German, but they don't work with the 
current versions of Festival and they still rely on using the MBROLA 
voices, which cannot be distributed commercially or even used by 
companies.

I see it as a real problem that the only German speech synthesis available 
is a close-source system with a problematic license that was abandoned 
several years ago.

IBM ViaVoice used to support German on Linux, but it is no longer 
available.

> I think the  Accessibility-Group should start activities to encourage
> the authors of various TTS systems and/or the Distribution maintainers
> to provide the end-user with easy-to-install packages (and easy to
> configure, of course!). 
>

I believe the best way would be to agree with the gnome-speech people and 
with Roger (from BRASS) on a low-level speech driver API that can be used 
by all speech synthesis related projects on Linux. This would allow 
companies offering commercial speech synthesis solutions to port them to 
Linux.

I plan to discuss this idea at the Unix Accessibility Forum with people 
form IBM and from GNOME.

> How did the Gnome people solved that problem?
>

They are in exactly the same situation - or even worse: Since gnome-speech 
is mainly developed by people working in companies, they have no support 
for MBROLA available, meaning that it is impossible to have German speech 
synthesis with gnome-speech.

Olaf

- -- 
Olaf Jan Schmidt, KDE Accessibility Project
KDEAP co-maintainer, maintainer of http://accessibility.kde.org

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