Hi Stewart,
Most kind of you to remember that I use dectalk in hardware form.
actually, I am on the dectalk mailing list where allot of this work has
been taking place.
there are several efforts being made to, says this kindly, restore the
sound quality that I enjoy now as I write, which was profoundly lost in
later editions of the software.
Oh, and there does actually still exist solid hardware editions of the
dectalk.
its called the dectalk USB, sells for about $800, and can run under,
systems for which there are drivers, windows for example.
No one has written quality dectalk drivers for Linux that use the tool
though.
Sounds like my reading edge however.
While indeed some of the new efforts sound quite wonderful i am told
the code is absolutely
off the table to be used by anyone aiming to distribute.
That the source is out there at all, placed by a former digital equipment
corporation employee is setting off some serious legal alarms.
Honestly? everyone wishes they could do the kind of search leading to
exactly who owns the software and code.
and there is more than one personification at that.
Keep meaning to ring the Library of congress office to ask about the
search, speaking personally if owners could be found I feel sure they can
be persuaded to create a license structure.
Its an interesting debate, with some in the seriously open source camp
claiming that defunct company means anyone can use the material...just
no.
Thanks for sharing,
Kare
On Sun, 23 Apr 2023, Stewart C. Russell via talk wrote:
DECTalk - the venerable text-to-speech system (think Stephen Hawking, or
Moonbase Alpha) - seems to be available in source form:
https://github.com/dectalk/dectalk
There's a web demo: https://webspeak.terminal.ink/
While I've built it and run it quite successfully under Ubuntu, its licence
is ... troubling. At best it's abandonware. At worst, there's an owner
somewhere who hasn't found the github repo yet to shut it down. As such, it
shouldn't be deployed without taking legal advice.
[Karen - I know that DECTalk is a subject that matters to you. While this is
interesting news, it likely doesn't mean that new, cheap DECTalk boxes will
be hitting the streets soon. Some of the reasons include:
* the licence: you need the permission of a possibly defunct company to use
this software;
* porting: the software doesn't seem to be set up to listen to a serial port
and speak whatever comes in from that port;
* availability of hardware: small Linux computers are in very short supply
right now; and
* sound quality: the built-in audio hardware on most single-board Linux
computers sounds atrocious. Without an add-on amplifier/equalizer, I think
you'd be horrified at the lack of fidelity.]
cheers,
Stewart
---
Post to this mailing list talk@gtalug.org
Unsubscribe from this mailing list https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
---
Post to this mailing list talk@gtalug.org
Unsubscribe from this mailing list https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
