Re: Concerning natural voices and exclamation marks
Re: Concerning natural voices and exclamation marks @9: The US hasn't been back to the moon since the 70s for lack of motivation. It's a great place to build if you have launch costs low enough to make space profitable, but that only happened in the past decade, so until then, they'd've just been going for more moonrocks. I think the earliest we could reasonably have expected a moonbase, ceterus paribus, is around 2015.Analogizing the above to explain natural voice inflection (or the lack thereof) is left as an exercise for the reader. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/467027/#p467027 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Concerning natural voices and exclamation marks
Re: Concerning natural voices and exclamation marks Victoria is based on the macintalk engine along with Fred and Alex, so it does! Inflect on exclamation marks, although very slightly. Also, if you want to go really crazy, you can actually control the emphasis and program your own speech patterns, at least if you are using VO on the iPhone, not when using VO on the mac, the commands don't work there. This is another reason why I use vocalizer or Siri voices less often, because of how much customizability you can do with those voices. And dectalk, although quite old, does sound very natural inerms of it's inflection, I have to agreen on that. Although I haven't used it myself for long, just for a few minutes, a couple of years back. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/467009/#p467009 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Concerning natural voices and exclamation marks
Re: Concerning natural voices and exclamation marks On jeff.tdrealms.com there are several addons for DEctalk. Dectalk is a perfect balance between an easy to understand speech pattern and a reasonably natural voice. And it does inflect on exclamation marks. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/466925/#p466925 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Concerning natural voices and exclamation marks
Re: Concerning natural voices and exclamation marks @Mayana: LOL, someone just had to. Thanks for the Decktalk suggestion. Maybe I can find an add-on for NVDA that has Decktalk? If you know of any let me know. Does Decktalk inflect on exclamation marks?@Jack you're the second vote for Decktalk. I've never tried it but am willing to for choice if nothing else.@zseli: Good question about compact voices. I've found that natural voices behave consistently on this whether they're compact or not though.I didn't know iPhone had a voice named Victoria, but then again it's been a while since I've messed with my voice options since I've found one that doesn't sound as bad as Alex and have been using it for years now. I'll check out the voice you mentioned. Thanks! Still no exclamation marks I assume? URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/466923/#p466923 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Concerning natural voices and exclamation marks
Re: Concerning natural voices and exclamation marks hello. I would like to chime in and talk about my preferences, on Windows I can use eloquence or Espeak interchangeably, sometimes depending on the language. I've gotten used to them over the past few years, and they work fine for normal reading. on the respective side, though, on the iPhone I have a huge list of languages configured, and I sometimes like to see what particular voices sound like, but in day-to-day use, I use Victoria as my main voice. she seems to be the balance between Alex who is very large in comparison, and Fred home I just can't deal with for some reason. on the Macintosh I do use Alex most of the time, because I want to differentiate my different devices in one Way Or Another. I find the Macintalk voices very understandable even at fast speech rates, and I love their sentence processing capabilities, that more natural sounding voices just don't have. so for me on the iPhone it's a win-win situation. I use a voice that is much smaller than most of the other ones , and she sounds very good. I can understand her at the relative speech rate of 100%. if I do use natural sounding voices, it's only to test them out for a short period of time. I have a lot of them just laying around, especially some of the older sapi5 voices, but very often I have to switch back to eloquence because of how weird they sound in almost any context. I do have to use them sometimes, like on my Apple watch for example, where no other options are present , and I stuck with Karen a lot during iOS7 or so. in most cases, it's fine, it's just if you have better options, take advantage of them, I say. there is two things I don't get. first, why do compact versions of vocalizer Voices , or other hmm based voices not include exclamation functionality? it's capable of doing it so why doesn't it? this applies to the Google TTS engine that I sometimes hear on Android devices, although I don't have one myself, but they don't even take commas or question marks into account at all, they say everything as if it was a statement . and secondly, some vocalizer voices are able to make some kind of question, while others don't have the ability to even inflect differently not just on questions , but on commas too. the availability of these types of inflections seems to be completely random, depending on which voice you decide to use. why can't they just make everything the same way ? And yeah, about Truevoice inflecting really weird, I have to agree on that, it's funny. And Microsoft tried to do some pretty interesting sentence processing with their Sapi5 voices back in the Windows XP days, I find those more annoying than funny to be honest. Speaking of which, Microsoft's one core voices are also HMM based and they do the same not inflecting on exclamations thing. I mean come on! URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/466656/#p466656 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Concerning natural voices and exclamation marks
Re: Concerning natural voices and exclamation marks I created a heavily customized espeak variant that I have been living with for years now, indeed I also still have a DEctalk Express that still works great. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/466644/#p466644 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Concerning natural voices and exclamation marks
Re: Concerning natural voices and exclamation marks Well, just switch to ESpeak!Just kidding. Nothing can replace Eloquence for me, either.I must admit though, that while I used to loathe ESpeak, it has since managed to grow on me ... like a tumor of sorts. It becomes much less annoying once you find the voice you can stand; for me, this is Male 7, with 50 % pitch and 40 % inflection. Since I'm stingy, and the Eloquence app for Android apparently isn't all that good anyway, I'm using that voice on my phone, and it's good enough.Have you tried DECTalk, by the way? It's also of a similar style; voices that're just the right combination between robotic and natural. It's indeed a shame that the older voices are so much better than the newer ones. Makes me feel like shouting for them to get off my lawn, and I'm still just a teenager! URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/466641/#p466641 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Concerning natural voices and exclamation marks
Re: Concerning natural voices and exclamation marks
@Ty, you can turn on braces by switching to most punctuation. I don't remember if you have to do anything else (I've had my NVDA reading like JAWS' eloquence now for ages...)As far as the triple dot, here's a copy of my default.dic file where I use regular expressions to turn an ellipsis into a triple dot.[\.]{3,} . . .01
[\.]{2} . .01
([^\s!\?]*)[\s]*([!\?])[\s!\?]*([^\s]*)\1\2 \301
URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/466627/#p466627
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Re: Concerning natural voices and exclamation marks
Re: Concerning natural voices and exclamation marks Vocalizer Nathan does question marks, but not exclamation marks. Honestly this is what happens when you go strictly off of speech units and have limited text preprocessing. I think NV Speech Player was trying to rectify that situation creating a cross between Dectalk and Espeak, but unfortunately NV Access abandoned the project and just made a modified espeak variant off of it with Speech Player's artifacts. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/466544/#p466544 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Concerning natural voices and exclamation marks
Re: Concerning natural voices and exclamation marks What about vocaliser Nathan? URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/466540/#p466540 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Concerning natural voices and exclamation marks
Re: Concerning natural voices and exclamation marks Hello,I do agree that true voice, especially with speed 0, sounds very funny with exclamation marks. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/466533/#p466533 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Concerning natural voices and exclamation marks
Re: Concerning natural voices and exclamation marks I started with jaws, so i'm used to eloquence, and don't mind it. And @9, how exactly did you do that? i want to make my eloquence read braces and groups of 3 dots but i can't figure out how to do it. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/466531/#p466531 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Concerning natural voices and exclamation marks
Re: Concerning natural voices and exclamation marks Ah, TrueVoice. I always found that synth's reaction to exclamation marks to be pretty hilarious. Interestingly enough, some versions of it actually reacted more subtly to the exclamation mark, and the rather over the top reaction may have been added later. And I think you're referring to the SAPI 5 version of Microsoft Sam? It also seems like Sam, Mike and Mary tried to guess where the the rise in pitch should be, though they seemed to fail most times. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/466515/#p466515 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Concerning natural voices and exclamation marks
Re: Concerning natural voices and exclamation marks Ah, TrueVoice. I always found that synth's reaction to exclamation marks to be pretty hilarious. Interestingly enough, some versions of it actually ignored the exclamation mark, and the reaction may have been added later. And I think you're referring to the SAPI 5 version of Microsoft Sam? It also seems like Sam, Mike and Mary tried to guess where the the rise in pitch should be, though they seemed to fail most times. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/466515/#p466515 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Concerning natural voices and exclamation marks
Re: Concerning natural voices and exclamation marks Honestly, I think a lot of why voices in general don't react to exclamations is that manufacturers don't really know what to do. Eloquence and ESpeak do a pretty good subtle hint of an exclamation mark, but True Voice goes way over the top with it, and imho the old Microsoft Sapi 5 voices went a little weird with it too. I've always found the exclamation mark to be one of the most ambiguous symbols ever, since at the end of the day, it can mean an extreme of anything. Extreme sadness, happiness, shrieking in fear, or shouting in anger. I agree with the op that Eloquence got it right; it sort of does something without being dramatic about it, but some of the above synths, well, take a bit more of an interpretative approach. Maybe some companies just don't want to deal with the conundrum. Or perhaps they simply just don't want to program exclamation inflection at all because nobody will care. In any case, it's annoying, but I'm used to it to some extent.Also natural voices open up a new can of worms. The models which are used to concatonate the recorded segments are only really optimized for sentences/ statements. Some natural voices try to do questions but it often sounds fake to me. Like sometimes the inflection goes up by a small amount, but other times it rises considerably more. And with some voices, particularly older/less developed ones I messed with back in the days where I was truly obsessed with this stuff, they only rise in certain cases, or they don't rise at all. But even if the pitch does rise, it can be kinda hard to tell if the question is supposed to sound real or contrived, given how it can inconsistently break the flow of normal sentences which the voice is speaking. But maybe that's just me.I highly doubt they could do exclamations naturally unless they either A, use a cheap trick like only picking from stressed/high pitched phonemes in the recorded database, or B, slow speech rate slightly near the exclamation mark (which creates artifacts in natural voices). I don't know if Mac Alex does anything with exclamation marks, but from what I've heard of him, he had some of those digital artifacts I have come to dislike in natural voices, so maybe that's why other companies don't want to over-process their recorded phrases. At the end of the day, I think it is technically just too challenging/not worth it for natural voice companies especially.I'm kinda thinking that if these companies thought it was simple enough to introduce exclamation inflection into existing voices, then they wouldn't be resorting to recording specific phrases like "Help!" or "Run!" Or "stop it!" That strategy bothers me, because it breaks away from the consistency of the voice when reading, and is about as jarring to me as true Voice's shouting. Imho if a voice sounds bored, it shouldn't suddenly become animated because an exclamation mark triggered a prerecorded phrase. But, I think a lot of other people don't mind that as much as I do.With AI and Wavenet, this could change. But sadly, it might be a while before it does, since interest in exclamation marks in TTS doesn't really seem to be going up. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/466508/#p466508 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Concerning natural voices and exclamation marks
Re: Concerning natural voices and exclamation marks There are some exceptions to this rule, though the natural voices I've listed that inflect on exclamation marks tend not to do it very well. Alex on iOS, and to an extent IBM Watson. In addition, some natural voices have special phrases they'll react to when there is an exclamation mark added, such as Vocalizer Alison's "stop it!" or VW Julie's "help me!", though those voices don't tend to react to exclamation marks in a more general context, so it probably doesn't count. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/466491/#p466491 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Concerning natural voices and exclamation marks
Re: Concerning natural voices and exclamation marks There are some exceptions to this rule, though the natural voices I've listed that inflect on exclamation marks tend not to do it very well. Alex on iOS, and to an extent IBM Watson. In addition, some natural voices have special phrases they'll react to when there is an exclamation mark added, such as Alison's "stop it!" or VW Julie's "help me!", though those voices don't tend to react to exclamation marks in a more general context, so it probably doesn't count. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/466491/#p466491 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Concerning natural voices and exclamation marks
Re: Concerning natural voices and exclamation marks Great, glad to see I'm not the only one who can't stand natural voices not inflecting well. If someoneone with the technical expertise can shed light on why this is the case, that would be awesome. It's like the US, having gone to the moon in 1969, now can't do it for at least another five years. Why? We went there once before...@nidza07: I don't remember if NVDA's Eloquence has the issue you mentioned. I ended up creating a dictionary entry to stop it from treating the triple dot, or ellipsis, as a comma and force it to say "dot dot dot" as the FS version of Eloquence does. But I don't remember if I also corrected the joining of words in that entry or not. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/466486/#p466486 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Concerning natural voices and exclamation marks
Re: Concerning natural voices and exclamation marks Great, glad to see I'm not the only one who can't stand natural voices not inflecting well. If someoneone with the technical expertise can shed light on why this is the case, that would be awesome. It's like the US, having gone to the moon in 1969, now can't do it for at least another five years. Why? We went there once before...@nidza07: I don't remember if NVDA's Eloquence has the issue you mentioned. I ended up creating a dictionary entry to stop it from treating the triple dot, or ellipsis, as a comma and force it to say "dot dot dot" as the FS version of Eloquence does. But I don't remember if I also corrected the joining of words in that entry or not. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/466486/#p466486 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Concerning natural voices and exclamation marks
Re: Concerning natural voices and exclamation marks Yep, I agree fully with this topic. In addition, there is one thing I like about ESpeak, though this is subjective and definitely not as important as exclamations, and I do believe Eloquence also does it in some versions. Whenever there is a dot, ESpeak wont treat it as such if space does not come afterwards and a capital letter. It's extremely useful for proofreading, and it goes for any simbols which should be written that way. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/466475/#p466475 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Concerning natural voices and exclamation marks
Re: Concerning natural voices and exclamation marks What happens to the people who bought Eloquence for Android, then? Can they get at least half of the $20 as Vocalizer voice credits? If they are going to remove it from the play store, I guess they're a bit more honest than SVox, but is the Eloquence library that old that it can't be converted into a true 64bit binary, or is it just more royalties in the end? Plus, since when is Google forcing 64bit conversion. Eloquence worked fine on my Android Q beta. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/466474/#p466474 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Concerning natural voices and exclamation marks
Re: Concerning natural voices and exclamation marks @5, maybe not the greatest thing to say on this forum? URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/466467/#p466467 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Concerning natural voices and exclamation marks
Re: Concerning natural voices and exclamation marks @5, maybe not the greatest thing to say on this forum? URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/466467/#p466467 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Concerning natural voices and exclamation marks
Re: Concerning natural voices and exclamation marks Hi.I've used eloquence for many many years and think i'll keep using it for many years to come.I downloaded the NVDA addon from jeffs dreams and don't care if it's legal or not. Why? Because as Munawar said, the inflection of other speech symths sucks, so yeah, i'll keep using eloquence. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/466418/#p466418 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Concerning natural voices and exclamation marks
Re: Concerning natural voices and exclamation marks I recall that Samantha on iOS did inflect somewhat well. Then at one iOS update or other, she went so far backward that I half wonder if they packaged an older version by mistake, and called it an upgrade to secondary features I never use and hoped no one would notice that inflection got worse and pronunciation of several words broke for no apparent reason. It's like we're expected to believe that someone complained about their Natural Voice inflecting on exclamations, and they removed the feature to fit in with the crowd. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/466414/#p466414 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Concerning natural voices and exclamation marks
Re: Concerning natural voices and exclamation marks As some may know already, eloquence on Android, is no longer on the ‘play store.” Code Factory does not have the expertise to update the Eloquence app from 32 bit to 64. Either that, or Eloquence on Windows is a higher priority. On Android, your only voices from Code Factory now, are the ‘Vocalizer Voices.” Each voice, is 3.99 USD. Must I say though, CF voices mirror ‘Freedom Scientific” voices, and have definitely improved with their latest update. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/466393/#p466393 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: Concerning natural voices and exclamation marks
Re: Concerning natural voices and exclamation marks Wavent is moving closer to this point, but the problem is the market o natural voices is moving away from consumer use in general. Companies get access to things such as Vocalizer Studio for voice-tuning/inflection modification, and screen readers lose out on that. So it isn't just the fact they're using prerecorded samples. The problem with me is that the voices have become waay too natural, to the point where lazyass cheapskate corporations are actually using it for their ivr and explainer videos at the expense of the hardworking folks in the voiceover field. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/466343/#p466343 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
