I don't care for the espeak and English is my native language. I listen to podcasts at 1.7x speed and that makes it even more difficult to understand.
On Sat, Mar 24, 2018, 2:23 PM SundaraRaman R <[email protected]> wrote: > > > On Sat 24 Mar, 2018, 7:17 PM Nigel Verity, <[email protected]> > wrote: > >> It's always annoying when somebody mispronounces your name but I think >> the same issue probably exists for some of the episode titles, especially >> when acronyms or application/trade names are included. >> >> For first-language English speakers it's probably not so much of a >> problem but HPR has plenty of listeners for whom English is a 2nd language, >> so deciphering eSpeak might sometimes not be so easy. Would it be such a >> big deal to either request hosts to make their own introductions or, >> failing that, find a volunteer with a good speaking voice to pre-record >> episode introductions? Since slots are booked in advance it should be >> possible for the "announcer" to record them in batches, thereby reducing >> the burden. >> >> Beeza >> ------------------------------ >> > > We could take this discussion to a new thread, but yes, the eSpeak voice > in general is something I've wanted to bring up for some time now. As a > second language English speaker, I do find it hard to decipher most of the > time. After a few initial weeks of attempting to understand it, I've taken > to skipping through it (and missing the summaries) instead. It's not > entirely unintelligible, but it's like listening to an out of frequency AM > radio station and trying to make sense of it. > > I'm not that familiar with eSpeak, but perhaps one of the other voices > could be worth a try? If I understand this page > http://espeak.sourceforge.net/commands.html (-v voice) correctly, there > are 7 male voices and 4 female voices included with eSpeak. If one of those > works out, it might be an easier switch to implement than moving to a human > voice. (lf this is worth considering, we can take this discussion - about > the eSpeak voice in general - to a separate thread so as not to sidetrack > this one.) > > NB: just as a frivolous remark, I find it a bit funny that my chosen > moniker (Aaressaar) has the opposite problem - someone mentioned on a > Community News episode that they couldn't initially figure out how to > pronounce it, whereas eSpeak seems to have gotten it immediately! > > -- > Cheers, > Aaressaar > >> _______________________________________________ > Hpr mailing list > [email protected] > http://hackerpublicradio.org/mailman/listinfo/hpr_hackerpublicradio.org >
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