Eloquence (IBM ViaVoice) on the BT Speak
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Weird James
You don't have to ask me, just go to the btgeeks group at https://groups.io/g/btgeeks and read about it. Also Storm from Stormux did the work this was based off so visit https://stormux.org/downloads for eloquence on your raspberry pi 4 or 5 (or x64 for that matter).
Mckensie Parker
Oh hey, this is kind of cool. I'm not really a big ELoquence fan, but this is neat. I'd like to one of these days, get a service called Multi TTS running on the speak. That way if people really wanted to you could use something like, Oh i don't know, Google TTS. Ok, if someone ever got Google TTS to somehow work on the BT speak, that would be cool! It could be possible but you'd have to do some tweaking probably.
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Weird James
Multi TTS looks like an Android app. BT Speak runs linux, and someone did get android emulation working on it with a program called waydroid. It is possible.
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Brandon Misch
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Diego Gomez
I love Eloquence! I’ve been using it for 20 years and honestly, they’re just isn’t another synthesizer that beats its flexibility yet.
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CallMeAl
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Diego Gomez
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Diego Gomez
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1eN8fAjiTlsH6oRK0HHmVCdOA_wT4VLwe
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Brandon Misch
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Diego Gomez
Yeah. Also, anyone tried running TG speech box on the thing?
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Weird James
Hi Diego, I have got TGSpeechbox running on it since about version 2.9. The released linux arm binaries wouldn't run because it runs an older version of GLIBC and so I had to compile it myself. I haven't tried tgsb 3.0 yet because honestly it's depressing not having the benjamin, david etc. voices. The only ones that are configured in speech-dispatcher are Adam, Bobby and Beth. Voxin stopped selling eloquence around 2023 from what I heard. I bought it back in 2010 or so. It was x86 only, and needed to be run with some special outdated libsvc++ or something. Voxin handled all of that. There are voxins floating around but the same problem applies that Bmisch mentioned: they are x86. The apple mac M1 that I have, and the Android, use eloquence for arm but it's closed source.
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Diego Gomez
Oh, that’s good to know! Yeah, just as I thought. I hear that there is version 3.01 of TG speech box out now, and I hear that 3.1 is in the works. Really good to know on Eloquence though. Too bad we can’t even get access to the binaries, let alone the source code.
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Diego Gomez
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Diego Gomez
This is the device I started using when I was in kindergarten back in 2005.
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Diego Gomez
https://afb.org/aw/4/6/14808
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Weird James
I have heard the SAL was a useful device. I automatically would make fun of it in my mind but I think that's because of Pac Mate-related trauma. Anyway it was a machine for learning braille, not a computer for james to break. Did you enjoy it? Do you still have it?
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Diego Gomez
Unfortunately no. I wish I had one though. I enjoyed using that thing. Mine was provided by my district.
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Weird James
Probably for the best. Those things are expensive and the next person can use them once you are done. The pacmate was a loner I believe from the new york commission. The pac mate makes me sad. Hearing about the SAL makes me happy. The BT Speak is what the Pac Mate should have been and I am so happy to be here for it now.
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Diego Gomez
For sure! My guess is that the pacmate likely used version 5.0 of Eloquence. The way you can tell is if you try typing the name Liam. Version 5 gets it wrong.
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Brandon Misch
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Weird James
Well, now the BT Speak uses version 5.0 as well. Ahh. Sweet justice.
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Brandon Misch
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Weird James
Thank you for the history lesson on eloquence last being updated in 02, when I was going into nineth grade. Amazing. It has been on life support for decades. I don't know how apple does it but it always needs emulation or old libraries or something to work. Next up: get keynote gold working on the bt. Did I already make that joke? I mean I would love that and I would crack up. Like when sonic ran on gamecube 20 years ago. I am old.
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Brandon Misch
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Weird James
Yeah but it crashes enough as an add-on to make up for it not crashing back in the day.
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Diego Gomez
I remember somebody making an add-on for Eloquence version 2.0.
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Brandon Misch
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Diego Gomez
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Weird James
I bought MobileSpeak Pocket for like three hundred dollars? back in the day after buying a Dell Axim PDA. Man I really tried to make that one a notetaker and sent an email from it occasionally but it usually got used as a media player. That had a wacky sounding version of Dectalk that sounded like it was permenantly in a massage chair.
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Weird James
I believe Eloquence was developed by a woman, Katherine something.
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Diego Gomez
That particular version of DECTalk was Fonix corporation, and I believe it was version 5.0, probably the same distribution as what was in the DECTalk USB. Eloquence was actually developed by Sue Hertz.
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Brandon Misch
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Diego Gomez
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Brandon Misch
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Diego Gomez
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Brandon Misch
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Diego Gomez
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Brandon Misch
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Diego Gomez
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Brandon Misch
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Diego Gomez
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Brandon Misch
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Diego Gomez
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Diego Gomez
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Diego Gomez
https://youtu.be/7l-9v6fdDRo?si=S_dawiMwuH8JEu5R
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Brandon Misch
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Diego Gomez
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Diego Gomez
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