Re: Concerning natural voices and exclamation marks
hello.
I would like to chime in and talk about my preferences, on Windows I can use eloquence or Espeak interchangeably, sometimes depending on the language. I've gotten used to them over the past few years, and they work fine for normal reading. on the respective side, though, on the iPhone I have a huge list of languages configured, and I sometimes like to see what particular voices sound like, but in day-to-day use, I use Victoria as my main voice. she seems to be the balance between Alex who is very large in comparison, and Fred home I just can't deal with for some reason. on the Macintosh I do use Alex most of the time, because I want to differentiate my different devices in one Way Or Another. I find the Macintalk voices very understandable even at fast speech rates, and I love their sentence processing capabilities, that more natural sounding voices just don't have. so for me on the iPhone it's a win-win situation. I use a voice that is much smaller than most of the other ones , and she sounds very good. I can understand her at the relative speech rate of 100%.
if I do use natural sounding voices, it's only to test them out for a short period of time. I have a lot of them just laying around, especially some of the older sapi5 voices, but very often I have to switch back to eloquence because of how weird they sound in almost any context. I do have to use them sometimes, like on my Apple watch for example, where no other options are present , and I stuck with Karen a lot during iOS7 or so. in most cases, it's fine, it's just if you have better options, take advantage of them, I say.
there is two things I don't get. first, why do compact versions of vocalizer Voices , or other hmm based voices not include exclamation functionality? it's capable of doing it so why doesn't it? this applies to the Google TTS engine that I sometimes hear on Android devices, although I don't have one myself, but they don't even take commas or question marks into account at all, they say everything as if it was a statement .
and secondly, some vocalizer voices are able to make some kind of question, while others don't have the ability to even inflect differently not just on questions , but on commas too. the availability of these types of inflections seems to be completely random, depending on which voice you decide to use. why can't they just make everything the same way ?
And yeah, about Truevoice inflecting really weird, I have to agree on that, it's funny. And Microsoft tried to do some pretty interesting sentence processing with their Sapi5 voices back in the Windows XP days, I find those more annoying than funny to be honest. Speaking of which, Microsoft's one core voices are also HMM based and they do the same not inflecting on exclamations thing. I mean come on!
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