Flite in comparison to Festival has:
- pleasant voices
- samely comprehensible voices
- big problems when combination with ffmpeg streaming encoding over bash pipes (This is why I don’t use it for audiobook generation.)
- designed for embedded devices (see docs )
pico2wave in comparison to Festival has:
- similarly pleasant voice
- less comprehensible voice
- problems when one needs to be piping text into it and resolvable problems when one needs to be piping from it:
ln -sf /dev/fd/1 /tmp/stdout.wav; while IFS= read -r line; do pico2wave -w /tmp/stdout.wav "$line"; done | ... - designed for embedded devices