[DECtalk] DECtalk TTS licensing

[Karen Lewellen]

Please do not  stand in the way of another person's desire to add choices 
to the marketplace, because your chosen tool works for you.
I can say with firm certainty, as I am using Dectalk to write this email, 
that  there are loads of others who would welcome choices, espeake is not 
even a worth while consideration.
To answer the question starting this thread.
Last fall I sought to learn myself who  held dectalk Patents.
My first search, dectalk speech synthesis produced a Wikipedia page that 
tracked part of the  path, leading to a company in the  United Kingdom who 
did answer e-mails, actually providing licensing rates.
Now, I am not absolutely sure if they hold the United states 
authorizations.  If you write me privately though I will share what I 
learned with you.
Best,
Karen



On Mon, 30 Aug 2021, Devin Prater wrote:

> I mean, there is ESpeak.
> Devin Prater
> r.d.t.prater at gmail.com
> gemini://tilde.pink/~devinprater/
>
>
>
> On Sun, Aug 29, 2021 at 12:02 PM Nikita <nikitamailings at yandex.com> wrote:
>
>> Hello everybody.
>>
>> I am looking for an opportunity to license DECtalk software technology to
>> develop a cross-platform multilingual speech synthesizer compatible with
>> screen readers. First of all, on Windows and Android, and in the future,
>> possibly Linux and macOS.
>>
>> Unfortunately, I ran into the problem of being unable to contact the
>> copyright holders of DECtalk.
>>
>> SpeechFX, Inc. website does not work (speechfxinc.com), and I am not
>> receiving a response to message sent to the email that was previously
>> indicated on this site (sales at speechfxinc.com).
>>
>> I tried to contact Roger Dudley personally, who is the CEO of SpeechFX,
>> but his addresses, which I discovered in the public sources, no longer
>> exist.
>>
>> I know that there is an available software implementation of DECtalk and
>> even its source code is publicly available, but these are all illegal
>> versions. I want to officially license DECtalk for my non-commercial
>> project.
>>
>> I will be very grateful if someone can suggest how else I can contact the
>> copyright holders of DECtalk.
>>
>> If you have any information, but you do not want to publish it publicly,
>> then you can write to me directly at nikitamailings at yandex.com
>>
>> Best regards, Nikita.
>> _______________________________________________
>> Dectalk mailing list
>> Dectalk at bluegrasspals.com
>> https://bluegrasspals.com/mailman/listinfo/dectalk
>>
>