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

I seem to remember Bill Cox doing a considerable amount of research on this sort of thing a while back.  You 
might track him down and consult with him.  He's the guy who wrote the sonic library that enables one to 
listen to Espeak at a considerable rate of speed without losing clarity.  I remember he was doing something 
with other tts's as well.

Alex M


-----Original Message-----
From: orca-list [mailto:orca-list-bounces gnome org] On Behalf Of Mike Ray
Sent: Monday, May 18, 2015 2:26 PM
To: orca-list gnome org
Subject: Re: [orca-list] New Linux user, needing higher quality speech


As someone who did a lot of DSP programming back when I could see, if I could find a linguistics expert who 
could tell me what there is about the voice spectrum of a real human that makes it sound like a real human, I 
could have a go at mucking about with the espeak voices.

But because I can't see the spectrums any more I am stumped.

It's all very personal, but I personally have no problem with any of the espeak voices.  And there are some 
female voices.


On 18/05/2015 19:55, B.Henry wrote:

I totally agree, and have never used the default espeak voice for very 
long, and have suggested that they change the default.
I like some of the espeak voice/variant combinations, and have made 
voice files for myself and others so that some of these nvda/espeak 
voices can be used easily on Linux as well as creating a few new 
voices which include variant data in there voice files.
Even so I normally use the U.S. English male voice with no variant 
added or other modification as my default voice on Linux.
Actually the phone version of voices usually if not always filters out 
the high end as they assume that phone hardware is not able to 
reproduce the higher frequencies.
I am almost certain I tested  eloquence's phone spin and this was true 
there. If your hearing loss is most notable with higher frequencies 
having more emphasis on the midrange may make it appear to have more 
highs to you?
As for whether people would like espeak more if another voice was 
chosen I can only assume that some would and some would not. Once in a 
while I hear someone say that people would not mind espeak so much if 
only the nvda default voice was used as default in Linux...lol, but 
again I can only guess that would help some people, and hurt others.
I do always try and remind new users of any synth to experiment with 
tone, and anything else available for that synth, e.g. inflection, and 
to try all the available voices and or variants.
I wish those who package espeak would add a couple of female voices at 
least, and a couple o  the klatts in ready to use voice files. To do 
so for all languages could obviously grow the voices sub-folder of 
espeak-data  a lot, but at least do so for English where espeak is 
best in my opinion.
Again I think the bottom line is that voice preference is a matter of 
choice, and in many cases need as some people just can not understand 
one voice and can another, so even if one synth is well maintained and 
much cleaner from a coder/packagers point of view it may be of little 
value to some people who can comfortably use an old patched together 
speech engine.
Those huge old decktalk external hardware synths made  the best synth 
speech in their day by a mile in my opinion, and still are one of the 
easier to understand options.
I've not heard a decktalk box in years, but if my memory is even 50% 
correct they sure sound better than decktalk software speech, to me.

That "to me" is the key of course, and no matter what any of us like I 
hope we can all agree that it is very important to have as many 
choices available to Linux users both for use with speech-dispatcher 
and self voicing aps, not to mention speakup.
          No matter how mujch better Linux may be than the 
alternatives a user who can't understand  available voices, or gets 
headaches using them is not going to stick around to find out.
B.H. Registerd Linux User 521886 On 18/05/15 02:47 AM, Tony Baechler wrote:

Sorry if this is a duplicate post.

I've purposely avoided this discussion because I don't want to get 
into the open source versus proprietary software wars, but apparently 
my opinion seems to differ from the norm, so here it is for what it's 
worth.

On 5/17/2015 4:05 PM, Luke Yelavich wrote:

Its worth noting that NVDA out of the box uses an espeak variant, 
and I myself don't find that particular variant palletable at all. I 
disable all espeak variants on all systems where I use espeak, as 
the default voice is more acceptable to my ears.

I wonder whether people would think differently of espeak if no 
variant was used by default with NVDA.

I have used lots of speech synthesizers over the many years I've been 
using computers, going back to the Echo on the Apple II.  I've also 
used the Doubletalk LT, the DECtalk Express, DECtalk Access32 (not on 
Linux), ESpeak, Eloquence and who knows what others I'm forgetting.  
I must say that the only one of those I can stand to listen to for 
many hours at a time is the DECtalk Express.  I have yet to find any 
software speech that I like.  I find the software DECtalk to be 
muffled and hard to understand.  I can tolerate ESpeak in short 
bursts, but it gives me a headache.  I should say here that I've used 
ESpeak primarily in Linux and was not aware that NVDA ships a 
variant.  I like MBrola and could get used to it, but it isn't very 
responsive.  Festival is OK but not great and even more sluggish.  If 
I must use software speech, I use Eloquence for telephones.  
Apparently there are two versions, normal and telephone with the 
difference being that telephone has better support for higher 
frequencies.  I don't think that variant is available except on 
Windows.

Call it loyalty, being stubborn or whatever you want, but I'm still 
using the 2.6.32 kernel because it was the last one with Speakup 
support for hardware speech.  I would really like to switch to Orca 
for daily tasks, but I'm still in Windows because Orca apparently 
doesn't have serial support.
Similarly, I would like to switch to NVDA as my main screen reader in 
Windows, but it definitely has no serial synthesizer support.  That's 
really weird because it supports serial Braille displays and it looks 
like it wouldn't be hard to write a serial DECtalk driver.  I am not 
a Python programmer though and I wouldn't have any idea what I'm 
doing.  Even among hardware synths, I have yet to find anything with 
the voice quality and clarity of the DECtalk Express.  Note that 
versions of the firmware after 4.2CD are rubbish and not recommended.  
I like the Audapter, but they are no longer being manufactured.  I 
can't stand the Accent line.  The Echo was OK as far as the sound of 
the voice, but very robotic.

To close, if there is a way to use my serial synth with NVDA and 
Orca, I would like to know about it.  I would be happy to test any 
drivers if anyone wants to write one.  I have a slight hearing loss, 
so perhaps that's my problem, but I generally have a hard time 
understanding most software speech.
_______________________________________________
orca-list mailing list
orca-list gnome org
https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list
Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca.
The manual is at
http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-access-guide/nightly/ats-2.html
The FAQ is at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions
Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org Find out 
how to help at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/HowCanIHelp


_______________________________________________
orca-list mailing list
orca-list gnome org
https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list
Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca.
The manual is at
http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-access-guide/nightly/ats-2.html
The FAQ is at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions
Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org Find out 
how to help at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/HowCanIHelp



--
Michael A. Ray
Analyst/Programmer
Witley, Surrey, South-east UK

"In the beginning there was Debian, and Ubuntu was without form, and void"

Eyes-free Linux:
http://eyesfreelinux.ninja/

_______________________________________________
orca-list mailing list
orca-list gnome org
https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list
Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca.
The manual is at http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-access-guide/nightly/ats-2.html
The FAQ is at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions
Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org Find out how to help at 
http://live.gnome.org/Orca/HowCanIHelp
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