either or but not and

[mikebayus]

Last night, I had some time, so I thought that I would play with the Amy 64 bit installer since I had some issues trying to install the Callie voice in addition to my Amy one. I told you that when I try to run the Callie installer, all that happened was that it uninstalled Amy. I told you that it was a clean uninstall so I just left it alone and went back to using one of my other sapi 5 voices. I then got an update for my NVDA screen reader, and reinstalled Amy to find that she was more stable, and I could keep her without the fear of her crashing NVDA or, God forbid, my PC. I happily used her, until NVDA crashed in the middle of a critical download, and I had to do a hard reboot and start over. I did start over and all went well, so I think the issue is more with NVDA and the way it interfaces with Cepstral, and not particularly the Amy voice. I thought that I would run the Amy installer over top of my Amy installation and see what happened. Will it find Amy, and terminate?, would it ask if I wanted to uninstall Amy so I could reinstall her? or would it just uninstall Amy like the Callie installer did when I ran it. What id did was uninstall Amy and then take me back to the install screen as though I was starting from scratch. I only know this, because I had another voice enabled and I could still have speech. I now know that what happened with Callie was I had the Amy voice going and it uninstalled, and NVDA did not default to another sapi voice that might have been installed on my machine, like Microsoft Anna for example. When I ran the Callie installer a while back, I thought my PC had locked up, because I had no speech. Had I been using a voice other than the Amy voice, I would have heard that I was at the first install screen so I could install Callie. As I had no speech, and there was no sighted person close at hand, I was dead in the water, and I thought I had to do a hard reboot. I did, and I set my NVDA to default to one of my other Sapi 5 voices and decided to leave well enough alone. That is, until I reinstalled Amy.
I would gleen from my little experiment, that, in windows 7 anyway, it is not possible to have more than one Cepstral voice installed on one's PC at a time. So it's Amy, or David, or Callie, but not Amy, and David, and Callie. I know that there will be a version 6 of the swift engine coming out soon, and I pass this info on to you. Perhaps it would be a good idea to install NVDA on a windows 7 machine, and play with it as it is free and it works just like any of the Screen Readers for the blind that are not.
As for the Amy voice: I would not blaim Cepstral if you guys decided to retire her, as she is about 9 years old. I like her, because I just happen to like a sweet youthful voice as aposed to a well modulated "radio" voice. I depend on my screen reader, and I read long documents, so I have to be able to sit and listen for 2 and 3 hours at a time and Amy is the one voice that I can do that with. I need to stay focused and listen to the info in the document and not to the faults of the voice, like how good the Concatenations are.
amy is sweet, smooth and I love listening to her. build another voice with those same attributes, and you gut me.
I don't suppose you could talk her voice model in to coming in and re recording so you could build a brand new amy.
Anyway, for those who have the time, the inclination and the knowledge, I would invite you to downlode a copy of NVDA
http://www.nvda-project.org
and play with your favorite Cepstral voice.