Jeroen, No apology needed. Your podcasts and your input on the monthly community news is welcome and always a delight.
Maybe I am just over-sensitive, but I am very defensive of eSpeak in particular. This is no doubt in part because I remember what voices sounded like 30 or more years ago. Look for 'Dolphin Orpheus' on youtube, if anything exists on there. Back then I would not have criticised it because in 1990, when I was at The Royal National College for the Blind and Visually Impaired, learning to be a COBOL programmer, Orpheus was pretty much all there was to allow blind people to be programmers. Apart, that was, from refreshable Braille displays. At that time all access tech was ridiculously expensive. It is only now, for example, that we are beginning to see refreshable Braille displays for under about $2500. And the leading commercial Windows screen reader still costs the bigger part of $1200. Unless of course you get your hands on it at school or college, where Freedom Scientific almost give it away. In much the same way that a drug dealer will give away the first few samples, knowing you will soon be back and begging with a fist full of dollars. Things move on certainly, and now we are spoiled by voices like those available on Apple and Android devices. But none of them are Open Source of course. Jonathan Duddinton and his eSpeak has touched the lives of millions worldwide. Mike On 16/04/2019 14:05, Jeroen Baten wrote: > Hello Mike, > > Being the maker of this podcast I feel a response is in order. > > As stated in the podcast I am not an expert on speech synthesis. > > Also as stated in the podcast I was only evaluating programs with regard > to the HPR intro texts. > > Having a visually impaired close friend as well as my own daughter (45%) > I feel very sorry that I seem to have upset you. > > Please accept my apologies. > > regards, > > Jeroen Baten > > On 16-04-19 03:10, Mike Ray wrote: >> 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
