[DECtalk] DECtalk 4.2 Software for Windows

[Aksel Christoffersen]

Hi Nick,

 

Without being 100 percent sure, I think at least some latency is unavoidable with SAPI synths. However I think DECtalk works great with SAPI5 in JAWS. It’s certainly not as responsive as Eloquence, but I personally don’t think it has that much latency.

 

I don’t know much about Linux, but as I understand it, it should now be possible to build DECtalk 4.99 for Linux. You can look here. https://github.com/dectalk/dectalk

 

I’ve never heard of DECtalk 4.2 for Linux, if that is what you mean.

 

Kind regards:

Aksel

 

 

 

Fra: Dectalk [mailto:dectalk-bounces at bluegrasspals.com] På vegne af Nick Gawronski via Dectalk
Sendt: 4. juni 2025 18:18
Til: DECtalk; Aksel Christoffersen
Cc: Nick Gawronski
Emne: Re: [DECtalk] DECtalk 4.2 Software for Windows

 

Hi, I love those two demos a lot.  I have noticed with some of these installers that when using it with jaws with the sapi versions that the synthesizer is rather slow to respond to quick entries like fast typing or moving threw documents quickly or is that just because of the older technology?  I remember that there use to be a Linux version around somewhere but can no longer locate it does anyone know what happened to it?  Nick Gawronski

On 6/4/2025 10:56 AM, Aksel Christoffersen wrote:

Hi all,

 

This has, as far as I know, not been posted publicly on the list yet, or in any other DECtalk related forum that I know of. I’m therefore posting it here, n case anybody is interested. My apologies if this is already well known information.

A few months ago, Jake Gross sent me an e-mail detailing that a DLL-version of DECtalk 4.2 for the Intel architecture has now been found. This DLL is able to function on modern Windows like the newer DECtalk DLL’s, like 4.41 and later. However, it is not able to be used with speak.exe, so the most efficient way to use it is probably with say.exe, which works just fine. I personally haven’t tested it with SAPI5 or NVDA yet.

I’ve included it in the DECtalk Archive, both in my custom DECtalk Speak Windows installer, and as a standalone ZIP file. When installed through the Speak Windows installer, the shortcut created on the Desktop will launch a command prompt window in the DECtalk 4.2 directory, ready to be used with say.exe.

The Speak Windows installer can be found here

https://dectalk.nu/Software%20and%20Manuals/Software/DECtalk/Speak%20Windows/DECtalk%20Speak%20Windows.exe

and the standalone ZIP file can be found here

https://dectalk.nu/Software%20and%20Manuals/Software/DECtalk/Speak%20Windows/Individual/Digital%20Equipment%20Corporation/dec42.zip

 

In terms of sound, I would say it sounds very similar to DECtalk 4.3, though with a few small differences, such as DECtalk 4.2 not slowing down quite as much when encountering an exclamation point. Some of the phonemes also sound a little different when singing. It’s not really similar to the various 4.2 editions for DECtalk hardware in my opinion.

I would say this is now the earliest version of DECtalk for Windows we have with the classic DECtalk sound, since the 4.1 speak window sounds very muffled to me.

 

Here is an audio sample of DECtalk 4.2 with my own demo text.

https://dectalk.nu/Speech%20Synthesis%20Demonstrations/DECtalk/Aksel%20Christoffersen/DECtalk%204.2.wav

And here is a file of DECtalk 4.2 reading Jayson’s DECtalk demo, created by Jake on his own site.

https://datajake.braillescreen.net/misc_audio/demo42.flac

 

Kind regards:

Aksel





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