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
