You are of course correct about all of your points, but it doesn't do any
good if you can't understand what it pronounces. The head size on this synth
is minimal, so it sounds like he's talking with his nose pinched shut.
There's hardly any resonance, so the voice is pretty much in the higher
frequencies, which is right where my hearing loss is the greatest. If you
stick your fingers between your lips and then try to talk fast, that's what
the espeak synth sounds like to me. It is an 80s throwback.
Now having said all that, I don't think any of this could be fixed and still
have espeak keep a small footprint. This is why I haven't taken my
complaints to the espeak developer. That, and I have heard from others that
he doesn't much care what users think; it's a free synth, deal with it,
seems to be what the developer thinks. I have not confirmed this for myself
however.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Christo de Klerk" <[email protected]>
To: "Rob Hudson" <[email protected]>; <[email protected]>
Sent: Wednesday, December 11, 2013 9:09 AM
Subject: Re: eSpeak
Hello all
Let us just get some perspective here. While it is true that the eSpeak
voice certainly does not sound nice, but sounds electronic and rasping,
people are probably not aware that it can make use of the MBrola voices
which are human recorded voices. I have now for years been using eSpeak as
a SAPI 5 synth with Window-Eyes with the UK English MBrola voice which is
probably the most human sounding voice I have ever heard.
Then there are a lot of other advantages to eSpeak. First, it is very
responsive, probably because its footprint is so small. Its download is
less than 1.5 MB in size and that even includes all the languages it
supports. Then, talking about languages, it probably supports more
languages than any other synthesiser I have played with. It is the only
synthesiser that supports my first language, Afrikaans. Because it is open
source, I have been able to work on the Afrikaans voice and improved it to
about 99% accuracy. Of all synthesisers I have experienced, eSpeak
mispronounces the fewest words in English. Its accuracy by far exceeds
that of even Vocalizer. If you are interested in linguistics, it will be
very difficult to do without eSpeak, because it is the only synthesiser
which pronounces all Greek letters, the International Phonetic Alphabet
and many, many other unicode characters which are mostly ignored by other
synths.
Believe me, you get a hell of a lot more than the nothing you pay for it.
Kind regards
Christo
On 2013/12/11 04:52 PM, Rob Hudson wrote:
You get what you pay for. Laugh.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Russ Kiehne" <[email protected]>
To: "Don H" <[email protected]>; "gwmicro" <[email protected]>
Sent: Wednesday, December 11, 2013 8:15 AM
Subject: Re: eSpeak
I was wondering the same thing! It's one of the poorest synthesizers
I've heard.
-----Original Message----- From: Don H
Sent: Tuesday, December 10, 2013 9:23 AM
To: gwmicro
Subject: eSpeak
Have to wonder why GW went to the trouble to add such poor sounding
speech syn as this eSpeak.
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