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. > > > > -- Jeroen Baten | EMAIL : [email protected] ____ _ __ | web : www.i2rs.nl | )|_)(_ | tel : +31 (0)648519096 _|_/_| \__) | Frisolaan 16, 4101 JK, Culemborg, the Netherlands
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