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Re: [orca-list] New Linux user, needing higher quality speech...

People get very attached to a synthesizer or an editor or a desktop or a screen reader or an operating system and so on. I'm not sure Apple users have ever used Eloquence, but for some reason that's beyond me they seem to be pretty attached to Alex. A lot of people have problems getting used to eSpeak, and it's not just those users coming from JAWS and Eloquence. Just pop pop onto an Android list and bring up a synthesizer, and you'll see opinions are all over the board. I don't agree with your statement that eSpeak usage is small because of JAWS users and Eloquence. I think there are a lot of whiny people out there, but I don't think someone is necessarily whining just because they want a different synthesizer than eSpeak.
For my part, I'm not attached to a particular synthesizer. I can't accurately count how many synthesizers I've used in my life time. Right now, I use four different synthesizers every day, although I use eSpeak the most. I think speech synthesizers is a highly personal choice, and I'm not really too interested in what other synthesizers people are using or the discussions on which synthesizer is best. I just use what I line and let others use what they like. 

On 05/15/2015 07:58 PM, kendell clark wrote:

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hi
I'm going to chime in here and say that the primary reason espeak
isn't getting used more is simply because the large majority of the
blind community, which uses windows and/or apple, have grown up on
jaws or window eyes, which uses, you guessed it, eloquence. So when
they switch to linux and find that eloquence is not installed by
default and requires effort to get going, their first instinct is to
whine, complain, and generally be a pain  to deal with. I've been
working for nearly 3 years getting espeak improved, and have done at
least a fairly good job. Know what I've gotten for all my work? Yeah
but it's not eloquence. It's a poor repayment for all my effort. This
goes for all of joanie's, luke's, rob's etc effort on improving the
accessibility experience in linux. Rather than appreciating what's
there right now, and all the work that's being put into making it
better, what do these users do? Waaaaaaaa, waaaaaaa, it's not nvda,
where's my eloquence. Why isn't there iTunes. Why can't I use "insert
program here." It makes people unwilling to help people such as this,
and posts like this are far from uncommon. Linux does not, and may
never, have the variety of "natural" read "proprietary" voices that
windows and other platforms have, and when a person, blind or
otherwise, absolutely insists on having a certain voice and no other
will do, it's a moot point trying to turn them onto something else
simply because it's different.  That being said, the original poster
asked about  voices that are eaiser on their ears. Espeak can
definitely be harsh, at least in it's default voice. The solution
there would probably be a different voice that's not nearly so heavy
on the trebble. Unfortunately, this is far from easy to accomplish
until speech-dispatcher "finally" gets around to supporting proper
espeak varients, and this support is incorporated into orca. So your
best bet might be to use voxin until this can be achieved. This is
also a fact. You can't expect a person to put up with a voice  that
hurts their ears or they cannot hear well. If voxin is easier to
understand, install it until speech-dispatcher comes around. I can't
improve espeak's sound quality, this requires changes to the code that
are far beyond me. It may also be a consequence of how espeak works
internally.
Thanks
Kendell clark


Kyle wrote:

According to B.Henry: # Kyle, I understand your point of view, but
this kind of post is really # once again preaching in my opinion.
Those who can and wish to go FOS or # bust are already doing so,
and those who can't or won't switch away from # Voxin will not be
convinced.

I'm not preaching, I am only attempting to point out the technical
problems with using something so old and outdated that has to
maintain more and more very old compatible C libraries on its own
in order to work at all, and is unable to be rebuilt against the
newest libraries that all distros are using now. There's also the
fact that a simple typo or OCR mistake can crash the entire screen
reader, and that's no exageration. There is also a literary term,
which is also the name of a Bitcoin client written in Python that
will also crash the screen reader when speaking it is attempted. I
will not write those words here, as common though they are, I will
certainly be accused of being malicious if I write these perfectly
normal misspellings here. Believe me, just stick an h where the n
should be in Wednesday and you will feel the burn. Now go Google C
a e s u r e or w e b h e s d a y. One is a literary term that is
also a Bitcoin application, and the other is a common OCR mistake
found especially in old newspaper headlines. The first one I
mentioned is a one-letter typo, where the letter typed is very
close to the correct letter, so is extremely easy to mistype. Now
tell me again that I'm preaching. I can't recommend something that
is broken, and will refuse to help someone get it going, knowing
that they will have trouble with it. Sorry Christopher, I know
you'll wax defensive over these statements, though they are indeed
true. Do you work with/for the person who continues to package this
mess? If so, then I'm sorry for you indeed, but there's still no
need to be defensive of something so defective.

<snip>

# Also voxin works on several distros, and very popular ones out of
the # box, e.g. Arch, Manjaro, Debian...

Sure it works, for now, because the packager has put in more and
more old system libraries in an attempt to keep it working. There
is no rebuilding of the code, which is either lost or obfuscated
beyond usability even by the packagers and license resellers. The
old system libraries that have to be used to make it work can
actually pose security problems as well.

<snip>

# If it is important to someone to try and get people using
something # other than eloquence, aka Voxin, aka viavoice... then I
think making # good new voices for existing synths such as espeak
will be helpful. I've # made a few, but I am not sure whether or
not  they will help many people # who have a hard time hearing
existing espeak voices.

There are already many attempts at various voices for Espeak,
because making them is easy. It's now only a matter of packaging
them to work with speech-dispatcher until such time as it supports
proper voice variants, which is hopefully on the horizon to be
implemented sooner rather than later.

# The bottom line is that quality is a subjective term, and
although # certain aspects of quality can be objectively measured
at the end of the # day we are talking about personal prefference.
Saying that eloquence is # not high quality is at best a personal
opinion. Again this comes from # someone who uses ESpeak.

See above for the reasons why this synthesizer is of extremely
poor quality, and this is not just a personal opinion, it's a
technical fact. I point you once again to Googling certain words
that are known among the community of users as "crash words." Very
few other voices have such "crash words," and if they did, they
would have either been fixed or taken off the market years ago
instead of being held together by the increasing layers of
compatibility glue just to keep them working just a little bit
longer. Imagine if you purchased a TV with problems like this. Say
for example you turned on your TV and found that whenever a certain
shape appeared on screen, the whole thing would crash, forcing you
to turn it off and then back on. More common would be a malformed
packet caused by degradation of the digital signal, but you get
the idea. If such a packet forced you to powercycle your TV, you
would say that it's broken or low-quality, and you would rightfully
want your money back. This is the case with Voxin, ViaVoice,
Eloquence, IBMTTS, TTSynth, and on and on and on, but it's just not
getting fixed. Therefore, the quality is very much measurable, and
is very very bad, and if I purchase any one of these, even knowing
how broken it is, in many places, I should have the right to a
refund, or even a lawsuit against the vendor for selling, and
continuing to sell,  known defective software.

# I've seen mailing lists degenerate in to spaces doninated by "my
voice # is better than yours" conversations for days on end where
the clutter of # voice prefference posts makes it annoying to look
for the other content # being posted.

This is not one of those e-mails. It is a technical summary of why
people should try to find, or maybe even make, something that
works better, even if it sounds relatively similar.

# I've sure seen more email from people who can't get festival to
work # than those who have had trouble installing Voxin, and Voxin
certainly is # easy to install on the distro the original poster is
usiing.

Sure there's no trouble installing it, because someone is putting a
lot of effort into making it installable. Apparently, no one is
putting so much effort into making Festival so easy to install and
use, which is sad indeed. Voxin et al certainly aren't usable in
the long term, and I stand by this technical acessment. Sent from
my sun spot


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--
Christopher (CJ)
chaltain at Gmail
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