Hi Dark, Couldn't agree with you more. When I switched to NVDA last year and decided not to upgrade Jaws or window-Eyes I began looking for decent Sapi voices to use with NVDA. As far as I am concerned its hard to go wrong investing in the Cereproc or Cepstral voices.
For one thing the prices are pretty low. I've got a few Cepstral voices which only cost me $30 USD which is a good price considering Ivona charges $45 per voice, and they are not proprietary. Cepstral seems to be interested in making money honestly and intentionally keep their prices low so just about anyone can afford their products who wants them. Another reason I like Cepstral is they were one of the first to get their act together and upgraded their Swift 5 engine to 64-bit where AT&T, Cereproc, etc are still based on 32-bit engines. Since I owned a couple of Swift 5 voices they didn't even charge me to upgrade from 32-bit to 64-bit, and they work with my games. So I'm not complaining about their customer service and support at all. So the way I see it is if RealSpeak,Eloquence, and the other proprietary TTS engines continue to be high priced and continue with this proprietarial non-sense let them blow their foot off. As you say its not like they are the only game in town, and sooner or later they'll get the message we don't need their products. There are equally decent products around for a lot less money and the companies who make them are much more honest in my opinion. Cheers! On 11/1/11, dark <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Michael. > > Vocalizer has been an inbuilt option in Supernova (Hal), sinse version 12, > and I can't say i've noticed any appreciable difference betwene that version > of scansoft daniel and the realspeak one, though I am not sure about other > voices. > > i actually stil use the Dolphin orphius voice alan with hal, because I find > any encarnation of the realspeak voices not to respond quickly enough to my > typing speed. Only eloquence and orphius can catch up, and the natural > sounding English voice alan available from dolphin's site I find far more > preferable to eloquence or orphius synths, thus being the perfect compromise > betwene understandability and responsiveness. > > Back to realspeak though, those prices are horrible! considdering seerprock > and other freely available voices that run with sapi are only about 30 > dollars each, I have to wonder what the company is playing at. Ever sinse > they started this proprietorial nonsense I've very rapidly lost any respect > I had for them in the first place. > > All I can see this doing is absolutely insuring that people will go to other > companies like seerprock or kepstral for sapi voices, though sinse that's > pretty much been happening ever sinse scansoft stopped selling freely > useable voices it actually doesn't make as much difference. > > If they want to shoot their business in the foot, ---- well let them, it's > not as if we don't have other options afterall. > > Beware the grue! > > Dark. --- Gamers mailing list __ [email protected] If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to [email protected]. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to [email protected].
