I've installed RHVoice, and it is working with Orca on my machine. The English voice sounds OK, though I hear more of a Scottish accent rather than American. It is a nice voice, though. The maximum rate is waaay too low, possibly no more than 2X speedup from default. Some blind folks find rates up to 6X faster than default useful for work. I usually use 4X speedup.
I see that libsonic is linked in, which I wrote, and I believe Samuel Thibault initially packaged for Debian. It is also linked into espeak, but now days most commercial TTS engines incorporate the core algorithm used in libsonic for speeds > 2.0 directly into the vocoder. This produces less noise in the audio and mostly eliminates the CPU overhead of libsonic. So, actions to consider:
- Assuming libsonic is used for speech speedup, just increase the high-speed limit in sd_rhvoice to something far higher, like 6.0X faster than default.
- Longer term, consider upgrading the vocoder to produce cleaner audio without the overhead of libsonic.
If you or anyone on the RHVoice team would like to chat about how to upgrade the vocoder to generate smooth high speed speech, just send me an email.
Thanks for writing RHVoice! I hope to see it all over the place, just like Espeak. In the meantime, until it gets rolled out onto popular stable releases of Linux, I may be able to help you write a portable binary version of your sd_module executable, so folks on just about any Linux distro could use it.
Bill