From candide@urbanium.tv Sat Jan 05 07:00:42 2002 Return-Path: X-Sender: candide@urbanium.tv X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-8_0_1_3); 5 Jan 2002 15:00:42 -0000 Received: (qmail 12578 invoked from network); 5 Jan 2002 15:00:42 -0000 Received: from unknown (216.115.97.167) by m6.grp.snv.yahoo.com with QMQP; 5 Jan 2002 15:00:42 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO urbanium.urbanium.tv) (194.183.224.155) by mta1.grp.snv.yahoo.com with SMTP; 5 Jan 2002 15:00:41 -0000 Date: Sat, 5 Jan 2002 16:00:50 +0100 Subject: Choosing a TTS package (was: Lojban Text to Speech) Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed Mime-Version: 1.0 (Apple Message framework v480) To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit In-Reply-To: Message-Id: <022AF05D-01ED-11D6-A1E6-000393074A5A@urbanium.tv> X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.480) Received: from 212.68.238.171.brutele.be ([212.68.238.171]) by urbanium.urbanium.tv (JAMES SMTP Server 1.2.1rc2) with SMTP ID 45 for ; Sat, 5 Jan 2002 16:00:40 +0100 From: Candide Kemmler X-Yahoo-Group-Post: member; u=92614944 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