Thanks for the great howto on installing MaryTTS.

I have installed it and run it on my Debian desktop and I have to say so far that I fail to see what everybody is raving about.

Writing any kind of software speech synthesiser is a massive undertaking and I take my hat off to anybody that can do it.

But to those who gripe about eSpeak and rave about MaryTTS I have to say; eSpeak is lean and mean and supports dozens of languages.  MaryTTS on the other hand is bloated and the voice I have heard is not very much better than I am used to with eSpeak.

Speaking as a blind computer user, small footprint and fast, crisp operation is far more important than the sound of the voice.  I fail to see how I could write a long text document on a modest machine and expect MaryTTS to keep up with the fact I have been typing for thirty years.

And I am speaking as a blind person.

With one or two notable exceptions, possibly the use of a TTS engine by children with print disabilities other than blindness, nobody need look any further than eSpeak, IMHO.

Where something like MaryTTS _might_ win, is in the creation of static wav files for repeated use, but for on-the-fly tts, nothing beats eSpeak.

