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Domain: fpms.ac.be
Stories and comments across the archive that link to fpms.ac.be.
Comments · 8
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Either tell them to get a Mac or ...
Install KDE in Kiosk mode so if they fiddle about with it and stuff things up, just logging out and in again will restore the settings. As part of the install supply KPDF and Kate, Festival, Mbrola, and kttsd. Together these projects provide a very effective text to speech system which reads text pretty well to folks who are either dyslexic, or have tired eyes. KMail is not yet speech enabled, so you will have to use Konqueror and Gmail instead.
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Natural Voices Gagged: AT&T is asleep at the dI'm working on a project involving voice synthesis, so we've been shopping around and evaluating different systems.
We were hoping AT&T would do a better job than IBM at supporting their voice synthesizer. IBM pulled the Linux version of ViaVoice off the market without so much as a peep to their adoring fans on Slashdot, and wiped all mention of the Linux version from their web server. (Goggle isn't even allowed to cache it.) After IBM milked the slashdot linux fanboy publicity for all it was worth, they appearently didn't see any purpose in actually SUPPORTING the product -- so once their libraries stopped working against the latest Gnu/Linux libraries (happy birthday RMS!), they dropped their Linux voice synthesizer product like a hot potato instead of bothering to recompile it and issue an update.
So we hoped AT&T would show more comittment to the promises they made on their web site about their flagship voice synthesizer product, but...
Has anyone actually tried buying a single user copy of Natural Voices from AT&T? YOU CAN'T ANYMORE! They used to sell the synthesizer for workstations and voices for competitive prices (in the 100s of dollars range). So we bought a few voices to evaluate, and sent some simple technical questions into the email address they provided for support, never receiving a reply.
After several weeks they never answered any of our questions, but we decided to buy some more voices to evaluate anyway. But by then, AT&T had pulled the consumer single user version of Natural Voices off of the market (and it took weeks of phone tag to find that out because they don't give out "technical" information on the phone, and they never answer their email support address).
Now if you want to buy a Natural Voice from AT&T, you have to buy the server edition for tens of thousands of dollars. Had their support not absolutely sucked, it might have been worth us paying such a high price, but no way we'd ever consider going with AT&T, after they demonstrated such horrible unresponsive service.
Actually it's a good thing we didn't go with AT&T's voice synthesizer, because we need support for voice authoring tools, and AT&T is incompetent in that regard, since they refuse to give out technical information over the phone, and never answer their email. No support whatsoever. Zilch. Nada. Forget about it.
Fortunately we found some excellent open source software that works together (and whose authors are MUCH more responsive than IBM or AT&T): the Festival Speech Synthesis System, the FestVox voice authoring tools, the small fast Flite runtime speech engine, the Edinburgh Speech Tools, the CSLU speech tools, the OGI Festival tools, and the MBROLA Multilingual Speech Project. This is state of the art research software, where IBM and AT&T got their ideas.
The quality of the commercial voices comes more from throwing lots of time and money into the production process -- the commercial software is not any more advanced than the open source research projects -- in fact the research projects inspired the commercial products!
-A speech synthesizer user who's been jerked around by AT&T and IBM, and is now happy to have no other choice but to use excellent open source software.
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In the 'has been doing that for a while' series :
My (former) university : mbrola
It is even is free (as in beer) for personnal use. -
good point.some authors however do choose to put political stuff in their licenses. From mbrola (free speech synthesizer):
Permission is granted to use this Program for non-commercial, non-military purposes,
(emphasis mine). Not exactly what's discussed here, but same direction. GNU could also choose to include something similar in the GPL if they (we?) wanted to (that would at least make the scenario you described illegal, for what it's worth), but they don't. IMHO that's the relevant choice. -
Re:Slashdot !
Filtering out -1 posts, that's clever.
This way I can post you email address.
dago@magellan.fpms.ac.be
And you won't notice it, but spammers will. Dweeb! -
FreshVegetables
My favorite 'NMS' program is definitely MRTG which produces many interesting graphics but may not fit your needs. But, if you have some time, you can program your own shell script that may ask your cisco switches some info
Anyway, OpenNMS is also fine and maybe you can be interested in Extreme Happy Netflow Tool", more related to cisco and netflow.
For spanning tree info, I don't see anyhting but I don't see everything too so
Slightly off-topic : if you want see MRTG graphics, just have a look at our Student network or the Linux box who is currently on his knees because of users (P133 - 32 Mo RAM with apache, squid, mysql,
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The other way around, Say.This is not actually text-to-speech but it is close and the speech is really good. There may be some new pre-processors which make it text-to-speech now (it's been a year since I've messed with this).
Check the mbrola homepage.
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Excelent Text-To-Speech
Take a look at The MBROLA Project.. I played around with text-to-speech a few months ago and this was one of, if not the best I found. "Freely Available multilingual synthesizer!"