Quote:
Originally Posted by geekmaster
Or more likely, amazon does not want to pay TTS LICENSING FEES for old devices...
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Actually, Amazon doesn't have to pay any licensing fees at all, because
they acquired the maker of the Ivona TTS voices in 2013.
Quote:
Originally Posted by geekmaster
However, there are a number of open source TTS engines.
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eSpeak is certainly better than Hawkings ancient TTS system, but I can't imagine listening to books read by that system.
I tested Open Source TTS voices some time ago, because one of my machines runs Linux, but there really isn't any free TTS voice that comes close to the Ivona voices and other commercial TTS products.
In that respect Open Source is utterly underdeveloped and many visually impaired Linux computer users eventually switched to OS X, because TTS is built into the OS and each version comes with number of high quality voices in a couple of different languages.