Hello all
Let us just get some perspective here. While it is true that the eSpeak
voice certainly does not sound nice, but sounds electronic and rasping,
people are probably not aware that it can make use of the MBrola voices
which are human recorded voices. I have now for years been using eSpeak
as a SAPI 5 synth with Window-Eyes with the UK English MBrola voice
which is probably the most human sounding voice I have ever heard.
Then there are a lot of other advantages to eSpeak. First, it is very
responsive, probably because its footprint is so small. Its download is
less than 1.5 MB in size and that even includes all the languages it
supports. Then, talking about languages, it probably supports more
languages than any other synthesiser I have played with. It is the only
synthesiser that supports my first language, Afrikaans. Because it is
open source, I have been able to work on the Afrikaans voice and
improved it to about 99% accuracy. Of all synthesisers I have
experienced, eSpeak mispronounces the fewest words in English. Its
accuracy by far exceeds that of even Vocalizer. If you are interested in
linguistics, it will be very difficult to do without eSpeak, because it
is the only synthesiser which pronounces all Greek letters, the
International Phonetic Alphabet and many, many other unicode characters
which are mostly ignored by other synths.
Believe me, you get a hell of a lot more than the nothing you pay for it.
Kind regards
Christo
On 2013/12/11 04:52 PM, Rob Hudson wrote:
You get what you pay for. Laugh.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Russ Kiehne" <[email protected]>
To: "Don H" <[email protected]>; "gwmicro" <[email protected]>
Sent: Wednesday, December 11, 2013 8:15 AM
Subject: Re: eSpeak
I was wondering the same thing! It's one of the poorest synthesizers
I've heard.
-----Original Message----- From: Don H
Sent: Tuesday, December 10, 2013 9:23 AM
To: gwmicro
Subject: eSpeak
Have to wonder why GW went to the trouble to add such poor sounding
speech syn as this eSpeak.
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