A portable Eloquence. IBM's Embedded ViaVoice text-to-speech engine, taken out of its 1999 Windows objects and rebuilt as C that compiles and speaks on a machine it was never meant to run on.
It speaks, and it speaks IBM's own samples: the audio is byte for byte identical to IBM's binary across all 81 test cases, from both a thirty-two and a sixty-four bit build. Nothing is borrowed at build time. No DLL, no SDK, no Wine.
make
./build/evv -o hello.wav "Hello from Eloquence."
That wants a C compiler, Python, and about a quarter of an hour, most of it compiling the rules. make RULES=bytecode is the same engine in half a minute with no Python, saying the same samples; it runs the rules interpreted rather than compiled, which costs rather more than half the speed. On Linux nothing plays the audio yet, so the engine writes a wave file; pipe it into a player to hear it at once:
./build/evv "Hello from Eloquence." | aplay -q -
On Windows there is a speak window. Take evvspeak.exe from the latest release, type something, pick one of the eight voices, and hear it; evv.exe beside it is the same engine on the command line. One file each, nothing to install, and make win builds both from here with mingw.
eci.dll is in the release too: the same engine exporting the names IBM published, so a program written against IBM's library can load ours instead -- a screen reader add-on, for instance. It ships in both bitnesses, in folders that say which is which: an add-on that loads the engine into the reader's own process wants the reader's bitness, and the most used one hosts the engine in a thirty-two bit process of its own whatever the reader is.
./build/evv -h says what the options are, and ./build/evv -l says what each of the eight voices is set to.
src is the engine: hand-written C, one file per object in IBM's own module decomposition, so that a file can be checked against the object it came from.
lang/enus is US English: the rules, the constants they read, the sets, the link tables, the voice presets and the dictionary. This is the part lifted out of IBM's objects rather than written, and it is in the tree so that the engine builds without the SDK. lang/dede is German, lifted the same way. A build takes as many languages as it is given -- make LANGS="lang/enus lang/dede" puts both in one binary and the caller picks between them. English is the one that is finished; German matches IBM over the cases there are for it. docs/status.md says in which configurations.
cli/evv.c is the command above and win/speak.c is the speak window. cli/probe.c is the same engine behind a front that reports what it answered at every step, which is what test sets against IBM's binary case for case. tools holds the lifters, the decompiler and the analysers. reference builds IBM's own binary under Wine, which is what the tests compare against.
docs/building.md is what you need, what to build, and what each variable does.
docs/status.md is what works, what does not, and what has not been started.
docs/tree.md says what every directory is for.
Our own work -- the engine, the two front ends, the tools, the tests and the documents -- is under the MIT licence in LICENSE.
The language data under lang is not ours. It is transcribed out of IBM's Embedded ViaVoice objects, byte for byte where the engine's arithmetic depends on it, and it is IBM's work. The MIT licence does not cover it and we are in no position to license it to anyone. NOTICE says what it is, whose it is, and who the rights in it may belong to today.
Nothing else of IBM's is here. The objects the port was read out of, and the headers and symbol tables it was read with, are not in the tree and are not needed to build. IBM still serves the SDK they came out of from its own public download host, and docs/building.md says where it is and what to do with it -- which is what anyone wanting to check this work against the original, or to add one of the seven other languages, would start from.