DECTalk for Raspberry Pi OS

[scruss]

So a full version of the legendary text-to-speech system DECTalk (think Stephen Hawking's voice) is available for Raspberry Pi, and is under active development. I've successfully compiled it on a couple of Raspberry Pi 4s, and it has all of the features one might expect.

The project, with source and documentation, is here: dectalk/dectalk: Modern builds for the 90s/00s DECtalk text-to-speech application.. There's also an Emscripten version that runs in the browser: DECtalk for Web

There are a couple of problems, though:

• 64-bit only: it fails to compile under 32-bit Raspberry Pi OS
• the licence: the source became available in an unusual way, and the current owner of the IP appears to be bankrupt and is unresponsive to contact attempts. The former (commercial) lead developer passed away a few years ago, but before he did he uploaded all of the project source to the public DECtalk mailing list.

Update: it now builds on 32-bit too!

[bls]

Wow...very cool! I was at DEC when DECtalk was announced, but it was never easily available in my corner of the company.

[scruss]

Note that it now builds and runs on 32-bit Raspberry Pi OS, thanks to this commit: configure: use CC as linker on linux · dectalk/dectalk@ce286b5