Sending reformatted: SL's responses to all inquiries

[Linux for blind general discussion]

Hi all,
Thanks for your interest and for all your good questions. It seems like
maybe some of you missed the link to the demos that was posted in the first
email. So for those who didn't see it, I am pasting it again here for you
to click and listen. I'm putting the link first so you don't miss it. But
then, under that, I will endeavor to answer each of your questions as best I
can. So please continue reading after clicking the link:

https://www.readspeaker.com/text-to-speech-demo

 To Rudy:
Hopefully the link in this email will give you an idea of how the voices
sound. When you click it, it brings you to Readspeaker's official demo page
where you can hear short samples of the voices available. If they are not
long enough for you to get a sense of the flow with longer text, you
can email me for some samples in mp3 format. I tried to include my
email before but it just blanks out the punctuation. So I will spell out the
punctuation, and you will know to just insert the actual symbols instead. My
email is:

software dot liberators at slmail dot me

To A:
If there is enough interest in this project to make it official, then the
goal is to make Readspeakr voices available to any of the most widely
used Distros that have Orca or Speakup. Similar to how Voxin offers
Nuance voices that you can install on most Distros with screenreaders.
Yes, Readspeaker does offer both Swedish and Finnish along with many other
languages.
Please click on the link I included at the top of this email. On that page,
you will see a combo box to select your language for a demo. Scroll up in
that combo box and you will find Swedish and Finnish, then, once you select
the language, tab down, and press enter on "listen".
To the person who suggested further platforms of usage such as Mac
terminals and Linux on Windows, I appreciate the suggestion and this is
certainly something to look into.
Personally I only have experience with stand alone Windows, and stand alone
Linux.
I really don't know anything about the workings of Mac OS, but if a Mac
terminal runs on Linux compatible software, then it might be possible to
incorporate Readspeaker voices. However, with Mac, I'm assuming you're
dealing with Apple and whatever protocols they have as a company to
approve of third party TTS providers. That is an avenue that I am really
not familiar with, but if anyone hear is a Mac afficionado with experience
with Apple's protocols for approving third party providers, please feel free
to share that knowledge with me.
Mac and Windows already have so many natural sounding speech options
available that I'm really focusing on trying to bring Readspeaker to Linux
in particular, to give Linux users more choices for natural sounding speech.
So if Apple already provides natural voices for the Mac terminal, then it
may be better to focus solely on stand alone Linux systems.
However, it seems that the Linux on Windows that you speak of, should be
able to utilize these voices if its essentially still Linux software.
I'm still open to any ideas about Mac terminal and Linux on Windows, its
just that I don't have any experience with that, I don't know if there
are already existing natural voices for them seeing as it seems to be Linux
software but running on top of Mac or Windows, but any input on that would
be great.
To Chime:
We might be able to request Heather if we get enough interest to get this
project up and going. Although the only place where I have seen Heather
utilized is in their web-reader solutions which are a bit different from
their Linux compatible SDK. They do offer the option to have
customized voices though, so we might be able to request Heather if we
really want that. Personally, for US English I like the Julie voice which
is available to demo on the Readspeaker site, as well as the Sophie voice
which is what they used to record that mp3 file for Console users that you
listened to.
Let me know if you ever end up finding any samples of the Voxygen Hypra
voices, I'd like to know what they sound like in English and I havn't found
any Hypra samples either.
To Debin Prater:
Thanks for the input.
I'm a beginner so I don't have experience with the Emacspeak servers you
speak of. But if we move forward with a project with Readspeaker, the
goal would be to offer the voices for the most widely used Distros
that include Orca or Speakup for people to install the voices and use on
their local system.
I really havn't smoothed out the finite details on that as to how exactly
the interface making Readspeaker available for Linux screenreaders would
work in terms of the technicalities. For example, how to make it available
both for Debian based systems and for something like Arch, just throwing
out examples. But Voxin has done it with Nuance, so it should be doable
with Readspeaker and the guys at Readspeaker are apparently willing to
consider developing an interface to make it possible, as long as there is
enough interest in the community, and so long as it would be commercially
viable for them.
My first step is to simply find out if there is any interest, which, it
seems like there is a small handful here on this list that would be
interested.
Other Console readers might be considered as well, and would be mentioned
in an official survey before actually getting started on the project, to
determine what is the most popular Console screenreader for Linux users
and start with that. Hopefully offering voices for Orca graphical, and
at least the most widely used Console reader. I know there's quite a
few Console readers out there, but we'd have to really decide where
the developers at Readspeaker would focus their time and effort into making
their Linux compatible interface to bring Readspeaker voices to
screenreaders.
I think starting with Orca for Graphical, and then one Console Reader,
would be good.
Havn't even gotten into Emacs yet, but if that uses a seperate screenreader
and is widely used, then that would be something to consider including
if possible. I'm just trying to cover the basics of something for graphical,
and something for console. As far as I know, isn't Emacs like a text editor
and used for programming etc? Do people also use it like a screenreader to
access daily tasks on Linux instead of Orca Or Espeakup?
To Didier:
Wow, didn't know you also reached out to Readspeaker as an Ivona
distributor back in the day. Good to know. Its too bad that something can't
be done to bring Ivona to Linux seeing as one of their original pages said
that an Ivona SDK was compatible. But when I asked them, I got the
same response that Ivona is linked with Amazon now so Ivona is not an option.
I'm not the only one to inquire. You asked them years before me, and I
wouldn't be surprised if we're not the only ones to ask for Ivona.
Quite frustrating that Ivona is not more open to collaborating
for accessibility solutions on multiple platforms. Even from a
strictly business standpoint, Ivona could make additional profits from
selling solutions to Linux users. Oh well.
As for the Readspeaker brand voices, when I contacted them, they did say
that they usually only sell to businesses, not individuals; but they
said that in this case, they would be willing to consider developing
an interface to bring Readspeaker voices to Linux screenreaders provided that
there is enough interest in the community, and that it would be commercially
viable. Thats why I'm trying to get a baseline of interest, to see if its
worthwhile to try to move forward with this.
To Francisco:
Yes, I totally agree with you. Thats why I started this endeavor, first
trying to bring Ivona to Linux but that didn't work out. Now trying to
bring Readspeaker's own brand of voices to Linux. I too want to see
more natural sounding voices become available to Linux. Allowing Linux users
to have a similar range of natural TTS choices as Windows users, and in
return, more people may decide to give Linux a try.
Thanks to all for the inquiries, hope I was able to answer at least some of
your questions, feel free to keep asking questions or sharing ideas, and for
those of you who missed the link the first time around, please do try
listening to the demos available on Readspeaker's web page.
Thanks,
SL