Re: ibm tts run-time engine purchasing alternatives

[Phil's Free <philsfree@free.fr>]

Gary Lawrence Murphy a écrit :
>>>>>>"J" == John G Heim <jheim@wisc.edu> writes:
> 
> 
>     J> ... when you think about it, the vast majority of people are
>     J> going to expect to get a package that they can just install
>     J> with a single command or two. 
> 
> When you actually think about it, this is not true.  As Bucky Fuller
> once said "Design a system that even a fool can use, and only fools
> will use it" :)
> 
> The first demonstrable factual truth is there are many people today
> using emacspeak and speakup, and _neither_ system is installed with a
> single command or two.  Millions of people use Windows, and it is a
> nightmare to install.
> 
> The second demonstrable factual truth is there are many people today
> willing to put real money on the table for the ViaVoice runtime for
> Linux, not a plug and play system, just the shared libraries compiled
> against a glib from /this/ millenium.  No push-buttons, no hand-holding
> 1-800 numbers, no everything to everybody software that no one will
> ever use.  Just the runtime.  That's it.  Anything more and we'd be
> spending the next month of midnight oil desperately trying to /extract/
> the ViaVoice runtime libs from the otherwise useless package so we
> can graft it into the software we actually want to use.
> 
> I'm with Robert on this: the first company that will actually /sell/ me
> the useful ViaVoice runtime kit will get my money.
> 
> This is kinda frustrating.  
> 
> My friend Paul has been without his emacspeak machine since _last_
> spring because we blew a capacitor in the powersupply and fried his
> hard drive, and I've been unable to duplicate the old machine under
> modern Linux distros.  I tried every published trick to bootstrap the
> old VV libs.  FLite kept crashing, Java synth jabbers jibberish. We
> tried speakup, it drove him nuts.  We tried every existing free
> softsynth, none worked. We bought the saccent, it sucked.  We're
> stalled.

As long as ViaVoice code is not open source, Paul's nightmare will occur 
again one day or the other.

Regards.
-- 
Phil

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