Bug#552499: ITP: svox -- Small Footprint TTS

[Jason White <jason@jasonjgw.net>]

I am also interested in this package.

Unfortunately, this synthesizer is known to segfault while deallocating memory
when compiled under Linux x86-64, whereas this does not occur on 32-bit Arm
and x86 architectures. There is a need for someone with considerable
background and experience to try to track down the cause.

Based on the code which I looked at, it appears that large parts of the
Lingware files are probably derived from data by means of machine learning
algorithms. Consequently, there may be no "source" in any conventional sense
for this material.

There is a press release indicating that tools for building new languages and
voices were part of the contribution by SVOX to Android, but they haven't
appeared publicly as yet.

>From a technical point of view, based on my (admittedly limited) knowledge of
tts, this is a very serious technological contribution to free software.

I am interested in it for accessibility reasons, in particular its potential
to be used with the emacspeak, gnome-orca, speakup and yasr packages, given
the necessary integration efforts.