Kendell Clark

I'll be glad to help you. The default synthesizer orca uses is espeak, which can be a shock if you're used to more human sounding voices. If you've ever used a program called nonvisual desktop access, or nvda for short on windows, that's what it uses by default as well, although it has a voice in espeak that in my opinion is much better than the default. You have a couple of options. Linux does not have a lot of human sounding voices, so if that's what you want I'm sorry but you really don't have many options. But you have a couple of alternatives. If you want a more natural sounding voice, you can purchase a program called voxin, which is the old ibm viavoice that the jaws screen reader uses. It's an older version than the one used in windows and it's no longer maintained, but there are a lot of blind people out there that like it. If you're interested, you can buy it at http://voxin.oralux.net. It only costs five bucks, and you only need to buy it once. If you're willing to invest time and effort, you can improve espeak. What exactly is wrong with the voices? Are they just too harsh for your ears? Do you maybe speak a language other than english? If so, espeak is really one of your only options, at least in linux. Voxin can be bought in I believe six or seven languages, but if your language isn't on that list espeak is your best bet. We're always looking for native speakers of other languages to help us make espeak better. Other than espeak and voxin, there are commercial voices called cepstral, which can be bought, and installed, after which you can use them with orca. They're quite large, but if you want human sounding they're an option. If you're willing to make linux accessibility better I'd encourage you to join the orca mailing list, which is the main list for orca help. Also the espeak discussion list if you're interested in making espeak better. If you need any more help either comment here or send me an email and I'll help you as best I can.

man I wish I'd taken the time to read my comment more thoroughly before I hit submit. You don't need voice dictation software, you need good quality tts voices. Well at least I sort of covered that. Your basic options are, espeak, ibmtts or voxin, the names are numerous for the good old eloquence synthesizer jaws and window eyes uses. That's about it for the fast responsive voices. After that comes the natural voices. There's festival, which you've already had much more trouble with than you should have to get going, pico, which google uses in android, cepstral and ivona natural voices, and mary tts, which orca can't support yet. There is in fact a standardized speech API similar to sapi4 and 5 for windows, it's called speech-dispatcher. The main problem here is because we're so spread out, not all of the disabled communities have much to do with each other. I wasn't even aware there were people who depended on tts who weren't blind before I read your article. We need to form one big, committed disabled community and focus on improving the software we depend on, instead of being in our own little circles and complaining that windows and mac get all the press and credit. I'm as guilty as anyone else at this sometimes. I wonder if the linux foundation would consider adding some sort of tts effort to their core infrastructure initiative? It's not exactly core in the sense that enterprises use it, but it's certainly the cornerstone of software for most disabled people along with orca, the main screen reader. Added to that, we as a community need to get more people on the ground attending linux conferences and getting the word out that there are people who use linux every day that depend on software that maybe not everyone else has heard of. I've been trying to find one to attend for a while, but I live in east texas, and am usually severely low on funds, so can't usually afford the milage to attend conferences when most of the big ones are out of state or out of the country. We *can* improve this, but we have to put the work into it. We can't simply complain that windows has it better and expect that to get anywhere. And I mean me as well. I do this sometimes when I get discouraged. Linux has some amazing qualities, one of which is the ability to be run live and that it talks at launch, allowing you to install eyes free, a huge huge difference from windows, and I'm determined to make it better.