Ken I have just replied to Jeroen's response.
I should try very hard not to be so sensitive to criticism, or what I take to be negative comments about eSpeak. The truth is Jonathan Duddington's eSpeak has touched the lives of millions of blind and visually impaired people worldwide. And when I use either NVDA on Windows, or either Orca in the Linux GUI, or SpeakUp or Fenrir in the console, all using eSpeak as the synth, I take absolutley no notice at all of the voice. I am concentrating fully on what I am doing. In the same way that light-slaves like you guys are not focused on how bad your wallpaper is or how you would rather have a picture of Kate Moss than a blue gradient or whatever. Thinking about it, what needs to happen, is somebody who knows how to write Apple or Android apps should write a speech server which a PC screen reader can connect to with Bluetooth. Although Bluetooth is likely to be too laggy to make it possible for me to type C as fast as I can in the Linux console with good old SpeakUp and eSpeak. Emacspeak is even better than SpeakUp alone, again using eSpeak as the synth. Mike On 16/04/2019 14:17, Ken Fallon wrote: > Without sig for Mike. > > On 2019-04-16 13:46, Ken Fallon wrote: >> >> Hi Mike, >> >> I couldn't agree with Klaatu or yourself more, this comment and >> command deserves it's own show. You should contact Jonathan >> Duddington, and see if you can get an interview. >> >> However, from my own listening to this show I understood that the >> context was in relation to the use case of the HPR Introduction only. >> In that context many of your points do not apply. >> >> His walk through of the "state of the art" is something that I did >> myself some years ago and I am glad he revisited it. His findings are >> unfortunately (and this is again about the HPR Introduction only) that >> the natural sounding voices available on Linux have not improved. Back >> then they sounded old and dated, and now even more so when compared >> with Amazon Echo, Apples Siri, or Google Assistant. >> >> I had hoped to train Mary TTS to have a HPR voice but it was beyond my >> skill level to do this. I also contacted the Mycroft team to see how >> they encoded Popeys voice and unfortunately it was closed source. So >> we are still in the situation of having no "natural voices" available >> for the many use cases where that would be useful. >> >> I'm including Jeroen on the bcc and he can address your criticisms >> directly if he wishes to. >> >> -- >> Regards, >> >> Ken Fallon >> http://kenfallon.com >> http://hackerpublicradio.org/correspondents.php?hostid=30 >> >> On 2019-04-16 04:34, Klaatu wrote: >>> An HPR episode on this topic would be amazing. If you're too busy, >>> i'd be happy to read your email into a recorder and release the show >>> in your name. >>> >>> On 16 April 2019 1:10:29 PM NZST, Mike Ray <[email protected]> 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. >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> 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 > -- 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
