I got an error when I tried to post a comment about the latest podcast about TTS.
I don't have the error code now as I pasted it into an email to admin and the email bounced. I suspect it was because my comment was too long, here it is: Condescending and sarcastic. Oh isn't text-to-speech such a laugh? I get really, really annoyed when people criticise eSpeak. Anybody who complains about it sounding robotic obviously was not around thirty years ago. eSpeak's author, Jonathan Duddington, in my humble opinion, deserves a Nobel prize. He has probably done more for blind and visually impaired computer users, like me, all over the world, than any other individual or organisation. In fact it is hard to name any single person who has had such an impact on any group of users, apart perhaps from Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman. 1. It is Open Source. 2. It is tiny, the memory footprint is small. 3. It is snappy and can speak really fast, which is what we (blind people) use when we get used to it, speeds that would make your hair curl. 4. It probably has more language support than any other free and Open Source synthesiser. 5. It can run in a mode where it can return rendered speech, in the form of PCM, to a calling program, so it can be used in other programs. I don't think any other synth can do this. 6. It can even return phonemes, a mode which I have used more than once to provide a kind of 'fuzzy search' in a database. I regularly write and maintain library code, and application code, in C, C++ and/or Python, as well as Perl, and many of these code libraries have in excess of 100k lines. Including, incidentally, a library which used a combination of eSpeak and OMX to render TTS directly on the GPU of a Raspberry Pi when 'they' broke the ALSA driver on the Pi, which made the speech stutter and crash the kernel, and refused to fix it for about four years. If I spent all my time bitching about how robotic eSpeak is I would never get any work done. How much time do you spend when you should be writing code, worrying about your wallpaper or the colour of your screen's background? Or do you just not notice it after a while? Well, after spending years writing code when I can't even see the Sun when I stare directly at it, I can tell you I never notice what eSpeak sounds like. I would probably be equally at home working with flite, festival, or svox pico (which you missed). In addition, eSpeak is in use in NVDA, the free and Open Source Windows screen reader which is currently giving the multi-hundreds of pounds commercial offerings a real problem, and providing cash-strapped blind users a chance. Although now the Windows Narrator is catching up, I still prefer NVDA and eSpeak. MaryTTS is bloated. There was some excitement around it a few years ago, but it has more or less faded away in the minds of the blind and VI community, since it is so bloated and, as far as I know, nobody has ever made a successful screen reader from it. Even if there was one, it would probably make a Raspberry Pi choke. Whereas eSpeak runs snappily and happily on a 256k Raspberry Pi first-gen. The 'holy trinity' of the Linux GUI, as far as blind and VI users are concerned, is: 1. Orca, the GTK screen reader, written in Python, and a work of art. 2. speech-dispatcher, written in C, a TTS 'server' program which Orca connects to to send text and get speech from it. 3. eSpeak, although there are speech-dispatcher modules also for flite and festival, eSpeak is the best one IMHO. In the console: 1. SpeakUp, kernel modules including speakup and speakup_soft which make a console mode screen reader. 2. espeakup, the SpeakUp to eSpeak connector. 3. eSpeak. eSpeak is gold dust. -- Michael A. Ray Analyst/Programmer Witley, Surrey, South-east UK "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." -- A. de Saint-Exupery https://cromarty.github.io/ http://eyesfreelinux.ninja/ http://www.raspberryvi.org/ _______________________________________________ Hpr mailing list [email protected] http://hackerpublicradio.org/mailman/listinfo/hpr_hackerpublicradio.org
