[Kde-accessibility] getting text to speech software ????

[Bill Haneman]

On Wed, 2004-10-06 at 06:16, steven powter wrote:
> Hi all.
> 
> Just wanted if someone could possibly help me with something ?
> 
> I am trying to get a hold of some decent text to speech (TTS) software -- 
> for free ie open source -- if possible ?

There are several possibilities.  Primarily:

festival (widely used, widely available, Free/Open Source [FOSS]), but
not under active development.)

flite (aka Festival Lite, less widespread but more recent, arguably
somewhat less quality)

FreeTTS (sourceforge.org, FOSS but requires recent Java VM, under active
development).


I would recommend FreeTTS if you don't have a strong objection to Java,
or Festival if you only need to do simple reading of text files, etc. 
There are several voices available for either (and Festival/FreeTTS can
share the same voice databases I believe).

Docs are not great but probably are adequate for your needs.  If you
need non-English TTS your choices are more limited.

Also, if you want somewhat better sounding speech and don't mind paying
a small fee for proprietary S/W, you can investigate Cepstral and
Fonix/DECTalk, both of which have $25 USD downloads IIRC.

regards

- Bill

- Bill

> 
> I am writing to you from Brisbane, and apparently here, there are 2 
> commercial sellers of such software -- starting from around $1000. And I am 
> currently a uni student so can't really afford it.
> 
> One is called "OpenBook"
> One is called "Kurzweil"
> 
> But as I mentioned, being a uni student, I can't really afford paying a 
> large sum of money for some software.
> 
> Can anyone possibly suggest to me if there is any, and if so which, text to 
> sppech software that is good quality and not expensive (like OpenOffice for 
> example -- for word processing).
> 
> I am wanting to use it to read to me textbook material and journal article 
> material and being able to transfer its translation from text to speech onto 
> a CD or DVD maybe to be able to play back later, on say an ordinary CD 
> player -- ie on the same sort of format as for music -- .wav or whatever the 
> other format is called ?
> 
> Can someone point me in the right direction ? I would be grateful.
> 
> Steven Powter.
> 
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