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

There are no female voices available out of the box, i.e. you have to at least paste a female variant on to the end of a voice file and do a bit of editing to remove double naming and create a unique name for your new voice file. It is easy to do, and on my continually growing 2do list converting a couple of support emails in to a short howto is something that should get a priority star. While the majority of the nvda voices are rather terrible there are several very good ones, of course this is my subjective opinion. On the other hand there is really only one good eloquence voice that I would consider relatively human sounding, the default one. There is a 2nd eloquence option that is pretty much just a slightly pitch modified version of the default voice that's good, but it's so close to the default voice that I don't really consider it a separate option. Try doing nothing but adjusting pitch and see if you don't find that read and Glyn sound almost if not exactly the same. The latest nvda, (can't remember if an add-in is required), lets one play with a lot of detail of voice configuration with out going in and editing files with a text editor, saving and so forth. This excellent tool should make it much easier to learn how different parameters effect a voice. Just as with hand editing one should not change too many settings at a time until one has gotten a feel for how each setting effects things as there is often more than one way to achieve a similar effect, and one adjustment can cancel out another. 



     B.H.
   Registerd Linux User 521886

On 18/05/15 04:39 PM, Alex Midence wrote:

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

_______________________________________________
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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