I might be one of the few who don't mind the espeak voice, festival's
either. My best friend for decades had a voice that was hard to
understand. It wasn't computerized but sounded a bit like it was. Had
to translate for him often. For years I've been parsing text from books
and using festival to convert them to audio books. Lately I've been
having the kindle 3 w/keyboard reading to me. At this point the
standard computerized voice many complain about feels a bit like an old
friend who reads to me.
My real issue is that Ken Fallon can't seem to get my nick right!!!
On 3/24/18 2:21 PM, SundaraRaman R wrote:
On Sat 24 Mar, 2018, 7:17 PM Nigel Verity, <[email protected]
<mailto:[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
_______________________________________________
Hpr mailing list
[email protected]
http://hackerpublicradio.org/mailman/listinfo/hpr_hackerpublicradio.org
