[BRLTTY] speech with brltty

[Jason White]

On Sun, Mar 16, 2008 at 09:10:34PM +1100, Daniel Dalton wrote:
> So I don't really like festival. I was thinking of using via voice.

Have you tried eSpeak? (sudo apt-get install espeak if you're running Debian).
> If so would I need to use Stephane Doyon's files on his site? Or are they now 
> built in?

There appears to be code in BRLTTY for supporting IBM TTS, which is what it's
now called.
> And where do I buy the via voice from?

http://www.ttsynth.com/
> And how much is it?

Have a look at that Web site.

Note however that it requires old C++ libraries that are not provided by
default and which may (now or in the near future) be incompatible with newer
Linux distributions. This was recently discussed on the Orca mailing list.

It's your choice as to whether it's worth buying under those circumstances, or
whether it would be better to use an alternative such as eSpeak, or wait to
see whether IBM decide to recompile it with newer C++ libraries.

I've personally decided not to make a purchase myself, but then I own a
DECTALK Express, which gives better speech quality than IBM TTS in my
personal, subjective opinion. Unfortunately, Dectalk Express is no longer
manufactured, and software versions of Dectalk have given rise to various
problems as well.