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.
>> _______________________________________________
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>> 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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> 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
_______________________________________________
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