Subject: Choosing a TTS package (was: Lojban Text to Speech)

From: Candide Kemmler <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 5 Jan 2002 16:00:50 +0100

Hi,

I have taken the time to look rapidly at the different existing TTS 
packages.

I would suggest using FreeTTS (http://freetts.sourceforge.net) . Why ?

1) It is free (yes, I know, many others are also free)

2) It's written in Java, which is a simple language to learn, and there 
have been concerns about this issue from some non-geeks on this list. 
Also, being used by a huge amount of developers all around the globe, 
there's hope that some of them will get interested in the FreeTTS 
project and hence contribute to it's stability.

3) It's cross-platform, at least for those systems which sport a JSDK1.4 
implementation: Linux and Windows;

4) It is based on the other packages (Festival, Festvox and Flite), 
anyway;

5) It is backed by a commercial company, which suggests that it might 
one day evolve into a standard;

6) It is already well documented.

Well, that would require buzzwyrd (Jack) or randl.nortmn to either and 
respectively rewrite/write a software package to support lojban within 
FreeTTS, of course.

But I think it's worth the effort.

What do you think ?

Candide